[candiddevmike]

Google doesn't want you using anything besides Gmail, plain and simple. Adding an ICS feed is ridiculously complicated--you have to add it on your desktop in Gmail, and the on each phone you have to manually enable the calendar. Why wouldn't they just have the ICS feed enabled by default?!

[mgkimsal]

I've had to do 'subscribe to calendar' work on a few projects. With iOS, I can just give someone a link to ical data, and it checks whenever they check. It seems, in the google world, you giving a google product your ics/ical link, it gives it to google, which may check it then, then... periodically polls that link on google's schedule (which may be hours or days in between) with no ability to force the google products to poll for updated info.

Is there some trick to get google products to regularly poll (or poll on demand) for updated ical/ics info?