Tracking Down the iPhone Birthday Calendar
Saturday, July 31, 2010 at 9:30PM | Permalink We have a number of iPhone users in our office and I was asked a couple of days ago to have a look at something a few users had recently noticed - the appearance of a new calendar called Birthdays.
Whilst the users had a variety of iPhone models 3G through to iPhone 4 (both work and personal), I quickly noted that each of the phones was running iOS4. So my instincts were that this was probably gong to be related to a new iOS4 feature or maybe something to do with a new version of iTunes choosing to sync a non-existent MobileMe calendar.
;)
The calendar appears under "Other" in all cases and I couldn't find anything in the Calendar details in Settings or in the Calendar sync settings within iTunes. the upshot was that I was initially I was at a bit of a loss as to where it was coming from let alone how to remove this iPhone Birthdays calendar. At this point I took a moment to step back from the problem and tried to think like an Apple engineer.
;)
Birthdays are a very specific calendar purpose and would be based a round dates specific to individuals so I took a closer look at the iPhone's Contact app. I added a new contact and selected additional fields which gave access to a field called Birthday. After adding a suitable date I saved the contact and then returned to the Calendar app.
;)
You may not be surprised to learn that the birthday for this fictional contact appeared in the Birthdays calendar. Brilliant ... or not...?
What I had discovered was that the calendar was more like a "smart" calendar to borrow a Mac approach. This seems to be a feature where the new iPhone OS is being helpful. This is great and all except that everyone wanted to get rid of it as they didn't want it in there in the first place. People who were using a business phone simply weren't interested in having a birthday related calendar. People who had a personal phone already had important birthdays in their calendar, and presumably this might result in a doubling up.
I had a bit more of a search but I was unable to find a setting to remove or disable the calendar so I was resigned to explaining that this was intended as a useful feature of the phone and that it was automatically pulling in the information from the Contacts app. Everyone was fortunately enough happy with the explanation.
So if you want to remove the Birthdays calendar from your iPhone then it looks like you might be out of luck ... that is unless you know different or Apple tweak the OS to allow this to be disabled (I'm not an iPhone guru so it is entirely possible I've missed some special option somewhere).
I do wonder if in the future we might also see other "smart" calendars implemented by Apple? Country specific holiday calendars (perhaps driven by geolocation or cell carrier) or anniversary date fields in your Contacts might be viable possibilities.
iPhone | in Technology 
Reader Comments (29)
Thanks for your post. I have been searching and searching for something to explain this and finally found your article. I hope that the next version of IOS will have an option to disable this completely. Thanks.
I was looking for a way to delete this calendar. Since I have my own birthday calendar, created by "Dates to iCal" http://www.nhoj.co.uk/datestoical . It is a great and simple script that allow you to customize a birtheday calendar (and also annivesary dates as requested).
Happened to come across this post. I don't know about deleting the calendar, but you can just click on it to stop it showing up in the users calendar. Open calendar click on calendars button in top left, then click on the name of the calendar, it's a toggle on and off.
thanks for this - was actually wondering how to input birthdays into my calendar in a way i wont have to re-write each year and so this does seem pretty smart to me :-) thanks for your help
Ali
I also noticed that the birthday calendar taken from the Contact list is a day off (usually later), even though they are listed correctly in the Contact information.
Thanks for the info. At least I now know where the info is supposed to be coming from. I was totally confused as I had birthdays appearing on the same day in December in the calendar that didn't even remotely relate to the birthday dates I saved in my Contacts. That's what made me think it was something else. I have two contacts where one has a July birthday and the other a November birthday. They show in the Birthday calendar as 13th December! Deleting the birthday info in contacts removes these entries but when adding them back in, birthday calendar shows them as 13th December again!
Have now found out the "13th December" bug affects all birthdays in Contacts which have a year prior to 1933.
Phew, so pleased to read that the 13 Dec problem is not me! In frustration I have even tried to remove (delete) the Birthday Calendar, but all I can do is turn it off!
Would love to hear of further developments and a solution to the problem.
That's useful in simple scenarios but I maintain couples/families under a single contact record so cannot track birthdays by linking them to the contact, unless there's another layer of cleverness I haven't found yet!
Unfortunately, contacts whose first birthday is more than 77 years ago do not display when viewed in the Birthdays Calendar on an iOS 4 Device, such as an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.
See Apple Support Article TS3437 last modified 20th August 2010. I'm using the suggested workaround for now.
I think this is a bug - i noticed that I suddenly had a whole host of birthdays listed on the 13th of Dec. I knew that 2 of these were false but the others were weird becasue I didnt even have those peoples birthdays. went and checked the contacts and the birthday field was populated with a date 30th Nov 1899 (WTF?!) - i didnt put this info in as I dont populate the birthday field and have b/days in my normal calender.
Went back and checked my old iphone (3G vs3.13) and none of these contacts had the birthday fields populated - also checked my yahoo calendar where my calendar syncs too and nothing there. I did find this info in the respective contact files in yahoo but this can only have come from when I sync'd the phone as I DO NOT populate these fields.
Come on Apple - what the hell are you doing???? sort this code out.
i created a phoney contact from a real friend in facebook that uses the Birthday calendar and voila, it showed up in the iphone birthday calendar
Thanks for your hint, just go back to your contacts and delete the birthday in contacts which then removes it from your calendar
Cheers
Thank you for this--finally know how to use this. I hope this isn't redundant information here, but i noticed that if you had someone's birthday added to your regular calendar and it was tagged as a repeating event (yearly, which is how most of mine were set), you couldn't delete it by choosing "delete this event and all future events" without first turning off the repeat option for that date. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
thanks again!
Thanks for the explanation. I've been scratching my head about how to add someones birthday to my IPhone. Couldn't figure it out until I read this article. Thanks again.
Thanks!!!
HUGE! Thanks so much!
Thanks - I was scratching my head as well. To answer your thoughts on future items: They do have the ability to put an Anniversary in. When you edit the contact you can "add field", then scroll down and select "Date". It auto populates with the heading "anniversary" or you can change it to a label of your choice.
Cheers
Ok. I am not getting it. My Iphone 4 was purchased on March 26, 2011. Every one of my contacts has a birthday of March 26, 2011 and every one of my contacts has a anniversity of March 26, 2011. At last count I have over 300 contacts listed . . . going back and editing every contact will take forever. Then, what will happen the next time I sync again . . . ? Anybody have a better suggestion?
John, that sounds serious. I’d call Mac Support/ AppleCare for help with it. I hope you’ll come back and post the result. This could happen to any of us.