Birthday Adapter no longer stable (when used with Google Calendar on stock Galaxy S7 Edge)

[mikebeaton]

Dear Dominik Schürmann,

Thank you for an amazingly useful app. I've no idea why what your app does isn't default behaviour in Android (well... apart from Google trying to seduce you into storing all your contacts in their ecosystem), and I have found your app (in combination with DAVDroid DAVx5 so that I can store my contacts where I want) incredibly useful.

But recently I have found that the paid version of Birthday Adapter (and also the free version, I tried) seems no longer stable. I am using Google Calendar, and when I go into Google Calendar all the birthdays show briefly, but then disappear - almost as if accessing the birthday calendar makes it go away, or crash. Resyncing the Birthday Adapter account, or even removing and resinstalling Birthday Adapter does not fix the problem.

The phone displays no error messages when this happens, but if you would like me to, I am happy to look elsewhere in user-accessible logs, etc., for errors (I am a developer, though not an Android/mobile developer).

I am using a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge with up-to-date, stock firmware and all apps are up-to-date.

The problem seems less severe (or perhaps not happening at all, I will post back on this) using the built in (Samsung) calendar app; but no other calendars have problems in the Google Calendar app.

Until recently Birthday Adapter with Google Calendar on my phone was stable (or, at least, much more stable - birthdays occasionally disappeared for a while, but now they are mostly disappeared most of the time).

[KavarH]

I just installed the app on my Pixel 3 (Android 10) and had the same issue.
As far as I could see its not actually a problem with disappearing birthdays. The problem seems to be that it is resyncing on each calendar opening.

For me I could solve it for now with disabling the sync for the app. Which leads into having to enable it at sometimes/when I add new birthdays.

I think the app needs to get adapted somehow to work with newer android versions.

[call-me-matt]

Hi there. With some try and error I have managed to run the app on my Android some years ago, which is currently on Android 15 and the app still working. You can find my work in this fork https://github.com/call-me-matt/birthday-calendar (but don't expect too much). Help is highly appreciated.

I am not sure which branch was the good one, hope I got the right one here: https://github.com/call-me-matt/birthday-calendar/releases/tag/v2.1.2 - I added the apk to the assets.

[gsauthof]

@call-me-matt hm, FWIW, the official birthday-calendar app from the google store still works fine for me on Android 15 (Pixel 8a).

Previously, it worked fine on a Pixel 3a, with stock Android.

Thus, I'm curious into which errors you ran you had to fix in your fork?

[call-me-matt]

@gsauthof not much changed, only included the two pull requests from here. I am using my version, because I like the jubilee-markers to highlight special birthdays which tend to be celebrated. I never tried the version from play store, only searched F-Droid...