I have been playing with Nextcloud for a few months and I am really enjoying it. There is even a handy Nextcloud calendar app! But the problem was I had to log in to Nextcloud to look at it. So I started searching for ways to sync the calendar with my phone and this is what I found.
Making Your Android Compatible
The Nextcloud Calendar uses a protocol called CalDAV to sync. The problem with that is Android has no native support for CalDAV. Therefore in order to sync with Android, we are going to need some help.
That is where an app called DAVx5 comes in. DAVx5 acts like a middle man between your nextcloud calender and your android calendar. DAVx5 will talk to
I have tested this on my Nexus 5X and Google Pixel 2 and it works fine on both. So I feel like it should work on any modern Android phone.
How to get DAVx5
DAVx5 is free and opensource and you can download it from F-Droid. It is also available on the official google play store but it cost $4.69 there.
On their site, they say DAVx5 is open-source and free. ” However, it was and still is much work to create and maintain DAVx⁵, so we have decided to put it in commercial stores for a small fee. If you want to support this project, please donate to DAVx⁵ or purchase it.”
How to set it all up
Now that we have the app on our phone we can look at how to set it up.
First we open the app and hit the plus button to add our account.
Next we log in with a URL and user name.
The URL you need is the CalDAV address of your Nextclould calendar. Log into
I have hidden my address here but yours should be in the address box below where it says “Primary CalDAV address”.
Type that into DAVx5 along with your nextcloud username and password. Follow the on screen instructions and you should end up at this screen.
Make sure you put a check box on the calendar you want to sync and for good measure hit the refresh button. If all works well then your
What frustrates me about this is that it only seems to work with Google-based calendars and I want to avoid having my data pulled by Google.
I have Google calendar sync turned off on my phone. DAVx5 still seems to do its sync just fine. But is that really stopping Google from looking at the data? I can’t say.
I’m working to move to alt-tech platforms and this is a whole new world for me. I’m a retired techie from the architecture/engineering sector and I’ve found that once you’ve been out of that area for a few years, you might as well have lived in another galaxy.
After trying several non-Google calendar apps, I found OneCalendar, an app that has NextCloud syncing as an out of the box option. I installed it on my Android, connected it to my NextCloud calendar and it’s working well so far. The app doesn’t have al l the features of Google Calendar or Samsung’s app, but I can learn to live without them.
Another thing I did was replace the standard NextCloud calendar named “Personal” with another one I that I named “NC-Shared”. I’d found that the Google and Samsung apps named my Google calendar “Personal” also, and it was too easy to confuse the two when entering or displaying data. Simply changing the NextCloud calendar’s display name didn’t appear to change the “real” name. Of course, if I get around to abandoning Google completely that won’t be an issue.
Wow, nice find! Thank you for sharing that. I’ve also been trying to work my way off Google. You might be interested in the Librem 5 smartphone. I plan on getting one when my current phone wares out and money allows. But it will be a whole new learning curve when I’m used to android.
https://www.sysjolt.com/2019/privacy-focused-smartphone/