If you’re a Gmail user, you’ve already got cloud email, a contact list or address book, and a calendar (actually a set of calendars) hosted by Google. And if you have an iPhone, you want to connect the built-in email, contacts and calendar applications to those Google data sources.

It’s possible, but it’s not as easy as it should be.

“Not easy”, you’re thinking? Go to Settings, “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”, “Add Account”, and there’s Gmail — enter your credentials, the account is set up, what could be easier than that?

Well, that isn’t hard, but it also doesn’t work very well. If you use the “Gmail” account type, it doesn’t sync contacts at all. Email is there, via IMAP, but Gmail via IMAP has some notable deficiencies: push email doesn’t work (so the iPhone doesn’t see new mail or other changes right away), the delete behavior is weird, and there’s this extra “All Mail” folder which might sync an extra copy of all your messages. Your calendars are there — well, by default, only the main calendar, and not any others you may have created, or calendars others have shared with you, or delegated/published calendars like the one TripIt can automatically publish your travel plans to. (You can fix this with an extra step, after which multiple calendars work normally.)

There’s another way: add your Google account using the “Microsoft Exchange” account type. (If this seems confusing, note that what this really means is to access Google’s data services using the Exchange ActiveSync, or EAS, protocol, which Microsoft has licensed to both Apple and Google among others. Even more confusing, Google brands this method of access to its services not as Exchange or EAS, but as “Google Sync”. Whatever.)

If you do this, things get quite a bit better: contacts sync to the phone; email gains push (and in my opinion, the folder list and delete button work better). This is actually the method Google recommends for use with iOS. Again, only the main calendar syncs to the phone, but again, there’s a way to enable the other calendars, which is even more of a pain than the CalDAV method.

(Aside: I think the ability to get multiple calendars via Google Sync and EAS was recently added, because when I first set up my iPhone I couldn’t find this method, and resorted to adding my Gmail account twice: once using the “Exchange” account type for email and contacts with calendars disabled, and once using the “Gmail” account type for calendars with email disabled. This no longer seems necessary, but it may be a useful tip for anyone who wants Google contacts synced to their phone but for whatever reason don’t like the EAS/Google Sync behavior for email or calendars.)

You may also run into some problems with contact sync, documented on the “Google Sync known issues with iOS” page, under “Limited Contact Information”: “Phone number synchronization is limited to 2 Home numbers, 1 Home Fax, 1 Mobile, 1 Pager, 3 Work (one will be labeled ‘Company Main’) and one Work Fax number.” Another problem not described here is that phone numbers not exactly matching the expected labels (which are case sensitive) will not sync: I had dozens of friends who in in my Google contacts list had their mobile phone number labeled as “Mobile” instead of “mobile”, and these people showed up on my iPhone with no phone number at all.

The end result is that it’s possible to make iOS and Google accounts play nicely together, but it requires some up front knowledge, some extra steps in account step on the iOS device, and some extra massaging of, potentially, every entry in your address book to make sure the expected phone numbers sync.

Is it possible to do better than this? Sure. The late webOS synced all my Google data (email, calendars and contacts) easily with no extra setup beyond choosing the Gmail account type and adding my credentials. Presumably Android is capable of similarly smooth integration. Apple may not be interested in smoothing the process in iOS because they’re wary of Google’s dominance and want to push their own cloud data services, but given the number of people who use both Gmail and iOS, I think they do their users a disservice.