Sync Google Contacts and AddressBook.app

Published on December 07, 2009.

You may be aware of some limitations you may encounter to sync your Google Contacts with your built-in Mac OS X address book, especially if you don’t have an iPhone/iPod Touch. Here is the most suitable solution I found to get round of this annoying problem.

1. First of all, you must let your system think you have an iPod. Just open the file ~/Library/Prefereces/com.apple.iPod.plist, and change the FamilyID to 1001, then save it.
2. Open your AdressBook.app, go to Preferences, then click Account button, pick the “Sync with Google” checkbox and click the “Configure” button on the right of the latest. You will be prompted for you Google credentials.
3. One last thing. Your contacts are not sync automatically when you edit some of them or when you quit AdressBook.app. You have to set up a small script which will be executed hourly (Note: this part uses the notion of cron). Create the file ~/Library/crontab, and write the following line inside:

@hourly /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GoogleContactSync.framework/Versions/A/Resources/gconsync --sync com.google.ContactSync

Then open your Terminal.app and invoke: crontab ~/Library/crontab.

You should be ok, and your contacts will sync every hour. Have fun.