Hi everyone,
I’m building a productivity tool that makes Google Tasks and Google Calendar more useful for power users — especially people who use multiple Google accounts and want one focused workspace for today’s tasks, grouped task lists, and calendar-connected work.
One of the core features is near real-time two-way sync with Google Tasks.
While implementing it, I found Google Tasks sync much harder than expected.
Since Google Tasks seems to rely mostly on polling, we need to:
- Fetch task lists
- Fetch tasks per list
- Detect updates, deletes, and completed tasks
- Handle local edits and remote edits safely
- Support multiple Google accounts
- Avoid duplicate sync jobs
- Stay within quota limits
As the number of accounts and task lists grows, the number of API calls increases very quickly.
We have tried:
- Active-user-based sync
- Cooldown / debounce logic
- Local snapshots
- Per-account sync locks
- Limited sync windows
- Exponential backoff
- Batch local DB updates
This helped reduce API usage a lot, but it still feels like we are working around a polling-heavy API model.
For developers who have built production sync with Google Tasks API:
Is polling the only practical option, or is there a better pattern for near real-time two-way sync?
Also, I feel the Tasks API is still missing a few practical features that would make production apps much easier to build — for example, better recurring task support, richer due date/time handling, and so on.
Maybe I’m missing something, so I’d love to hear how others are handling these limitations in production.
Any architecture suggestions or lessons learned would be really helpful.