Noting this here in the hopes that it will be useful for somebody (or even me :)) in the future, since it took me longer than I expected to figure this out.

Scenario: you have a Google account with entries in Google Calendar that you would like to see on your iOS device (iPad / iPhone). Some (well, many) sites suggests that you need to install Google Calendar on the device. This is in fact not necessary!

All you need to do is to link your Google account with the native iOS Calendar App by going to Settings > Apps > Calendar and under “Accounts” add your Google Account. È voilà! That’s all folks! Hat tip to this article for reminding me about the procedure.

PS. You might need to do an additional step for the shared calendars, as described by Scott Hanselmann here: go to https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect and select the calendars you want to be sync-ed to the iOS devices. I’m not sure if this is needed, since I’ve done it several years ago and it was already enabled when I recently set up a new iOS device.

PS. PS. There is now a new option for ad blocking for iOS devices that is well worth considering: uBlock Origin Lite for iOS.

Image taken from John Davey’s Flickr album with permission.

To start with: good ad blocking is the best one can do for their security / privacy online these days!

For a long time adblocking on iOS devices (iPad / iPhone) was limited. One could use DNS based blocking (Pi-Hole or NextDNS are good options), but many advertisement circumvent these blocks. There was AdBlockPlus which worked well, however:

• I feel uneasy about the company behind it given past behaviour
• Even today, when installing on iOS, ABP forces the user to activate their subscription for a 7 days free trial and then one has to dig through the settings to deactivate it – less one gets charged after the 7 days
  • For reference, the setting is under Settings > Apple Account > Subscriptions
• Ad blocking extensions have full access to the content of the websites you’re visiting (by necessity – since they have to remove part of it). I’m not comfortable with giving this company access to everything I visit / type in to a browser.

There is the current gold standard in adblocking – UBlockOrigin – however it’s not available for Firefox under iOS due to some dubious practices of Apple (Apple makes it so that you can’t really install alternative browsers on iOS – all the “alternatives” are actually reskins of Safari – so Firefox for iOS can’t support the Firefox extensions, less it gets banned from the AppStore – hopefully the EU will look into this anti-competitive practice and make it end soon).

So, I was excited when I’ve learned that uBlock Origin Lite is available for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698

Some thoughts:

• first and foremost: it works well!
• second: it’s free – although I would like to provide some support for the author, they don’t seem to be interested in it currently. So here I am at least spreading the news about it.
• third: I trust this extension more since it has a long reputation of being trustworthy and it’s F/LOSS.
  • Sidenote: Apple doesn’t provide a way to verify that the source code published is the same as was used to build the binary in the AppStore like f-droid does for example – but maybe one day.
• what I also liked: theoretically it also has a minimal mode which doesn’t require access to the current website (see my concerns above about this kind of software). Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to work on the websites I frequent, but maybe it could be used in some situations where higher situations are needed.

And the setup:

• Install it from the AppStore
• Open Settings. Navigate to Safari -> Extensions
• Turn it on (optionally for private windows also)
• To avoid constant prompting, set the websites to “allow all” (the last option on the page)

Enjoy a safer, more private and faster browsing!

Update: also, don’t forget to disable the Advertising ID on your devices. Here is an EFF tutorial about how to.