iOS Calendar Refresh

Hi friends. First post, thanks for help. I have a situation where I need to refresh the default Apple calendar app to see an updated event on my Apple Watch (blood sugar reading). I’m trying to understand why the calendar doesn’t update, but a simple fix is to simply open a few apps with a shortcut, lastly being calendar. I’d like it in the background but find that the “Get events” shortcut will do the trick. It opens the app and I have to wait a few seconds for it to update. If this could be triggered by some code instead(so It happens without the app opening so I can end on the home screen) that would be best. Any ideas? Thanks.

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In the Settings app on your phone, under Passwords & Accounts > Fetch New Data, what do you have set for:

  1. Push (On/Off).
  2. Your calendar’s account (Push/Fetch/Manual).
  3. Fetch (Auto/Manual/60m/30m/15m).

These should control how often your calendar receives updates on that device.

The watch should sync automatically, but it can take a little while for updates to propagate across from the phone.

I’m not sure why a ‘get events’ action in Shortcuts would update the watch other than it could trigger a manual fetch of data (see above settings) on the phone which then passes on the updates to the watch through the usual OS sync process. But then opening other apps before it seems a very odd requirement to get that to work.

If you are triggering a manual refresh of your calendar, changing your settings to increase the update frequency may be a better choice than trying to automate this with Shortcuts.

I have a similar problem where some events don’t show up on my watch, even though some events from the same calendar are shown…
I’ve now tried to open the calendar app and ran the Get Upcoming Events, but that didn’t help…
Currently that happens with a subscribed ical calendar, but it also has happened with my default calendar, which is only synced with iCloud.

Hi @sylumer, here are my answers.

  1. On
  2. Push (iCloud Account that hosts that calendar)
  3. Every 30 min

Not certain if setting Fetch to Auto would help. It’s tough because there are two other apps involved (Dexcom and Sugarmate). This might be something best left to manual updating, but i think my focus is about the Calendar app. Does shortcuts allow for a script to simply force a refresh? Anyhow, thanks for your reply.

The watch should be updating off the phone. If the phone is not up to date, the watch won’t be up to date.

The fact that you have push enabled and push for that calendar account means you should always be up to date on your phone. Fetch would have it updating less frequently.

Given your phone should be up to date, it is just the inter-device communications at work and Shortcuts currently has no option to force the calendar to push any updates onto the watch. It should just happen as part fo the OS and native apps keeping things in sync.