Sunday, July 18, 2010

Sync Hell: MobileMe contact sync bug - does Apple care?

Every few weeks, I run across an Apple bug so egregious that I can only conclude nobody there cares.

The MobileMe contact sync bug is one of those. As best I can tell only the first, last and perhaps company strings are used to match contacts when synchronizing. So if a contact has only an email address, then the match is on an empty string (null key). This produces many-to-many combinatorials, email addresses that grow with each sync until every empty name contact has every other empty name email.

This is an incompetent design. The responsible engineer and product managers should hand their head in shame.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Totally agree with your sentiments. Also when syncing google contacts (android phone) with mac address book and mobile me you get double entry from hell problems because of a simple Comma between city and state in the address. As far as I can tell gmail contacts wants the comma and mobile me refuses to reconize it as an address and wants to add another address without the comma and then I have about every contact with two addresses. Nightmare.