Garbled Addresses

I have three locations where I store, access, and edit contact information:

• The iPhone address book


• The OS X Address Book app, on my Mac


• Google Contacts (i.e., Gmail)

They are all automagically synced together:

• the iPhone syncs with Google via "Google Sync" (which uses Exchange ActiveSync as the protocol, and bundles together mail and calendar data as well)


• the Mac also syncs with Google, via "Contact Sync" (the feature is built-in, but I'm not sure what protocol is used)


• Address Book syncing is NOT enabled in iTunes, and the Mac and iPhone do not do any direct exchanging of contact data.

Generally, this works quite well. Some limitations -- notably, contact groups are not synced -- but that's not a big issue for me. One annoyance, though, that I've been noticing quite persistently is the garbling of street address information on the iPhone end.

Specifically, somewhere in the syncing with Google, addresses are often parsed incorrectly and show up in the iPhone address book with multiple items (e.g. city + province + postal code) clumped together in the city or province field.

Both OS X and the iPhone address books use discrete fields for storing components of an address: one or more street address lines, city, province, postal code, country. Google's interface presents only a flat text area.

The problem seems to be the different ways that the iPhone and OS X handle Google's flat text area -- or, probably more accurately, differences in how Google's two different syncing methods assemble and disassemble the discrete address components into a flat field. I'm pretty certain that the problem lies in Google's sync solutions not using the same rules to interpret addresses.

A contact created in OS X:



when synced to Google is formatted envelope-style:



but when it's then pushed to iPhone, we see oddness:



because this is the data the iPhone was given:




Whereas a contact created on the iPhone:



appears in Google as less traditional but "cleaner" one-item-per-line form:



and from there it's perfectly fine in OS X.

The problem is apparently that the Google to iPhone syncing doesn't appropriately recognize the commas and double spaces as field separators, so information that isn't on separate lines gets globbed together. Or, alternately, the OS X to Google syncing should just use line breaks as separators.

Fixing this issue is a pain on the iPhone (which ironically is the only place where I "see" a problem), where the edit fields are tiny and inconvenient for cutting and pasting. It's a dead simple matter of hitting backspace and enter a few times in Google. In either case, the changes stick, and propagate to OS X without problem -- Address Book.app still shows the data correctly.

However, any subsequent edits to a contact in OS X will cause the next sync to change the Google address field to the commas-and-spaces format, and in turn make it look garbled on the iPhone again. Grr. So, note to self, don't do that. (Or if I do, fix it in Google right after.)


Google, please fix this bug.