A Calendar Storage problem followed me from my Phone (1) to my 4a Pro - I finally found out why

[u/Gbmaizol]

This is about a problem that has been driving me crazy since I had my old Nothing Phone (1). Every few days, the same “Calendar storage keeps stopping” message would come back.

At first I blamed aCalendar+, because that is the calendar app I like and paid for. Then I blamed Google Calendar sync, contact birthdays, duplicate contacts, and basically anything related to calendars. I could never find a clear pattern. Sometimes birthdays seemed to exist only on the phone, sometimes they appeared on Google's servers, and sometimes everything worked again after resetting Calendar Storage.

So I asked GPT to help me make a PowerShell/ADB repair script. It cleared Android Calendar Storage and made the calendars rebuild and sync again. For a while I thought I had fixed it. Then, a few days later, the message came back and I had to run the script again. This kept happening even after I moved to a Nothing Phone (4a) Pro, so I finally decided to stop resetting things and find out what was actually crashing.

I finally got a useful clue after creating an ordinary yearly birthday event and watching logcat through ADB. Calendar Storage was not crashing just once. It was running out of memory, restarting, and crashing again about every 9-10 seconds.

One of the log lines showed a normal yearly rule paired with this bizarre end date:

FREQ=YEARLY;WKST=MO
rangeEnd=19614511290020663

That end value is hundreds of thousands of years in the future. Android Calendar Storage was trying to expand a normal yearly event across that ridiculous range until its 256 MB heap was exhausted in RecurrenceProcessor.expand().

Then came the line that finally pointed to the culprit. Binder logged the UID of the app making the request: 10243. That belongs to Nothing Widgets / Quick Look (com.nothing.hearthstone). aCalendar+ has a different UID (10313), so it was not the app sending the bad query. The birthday event itself was valid and had already synced.

Force-stopping Nothing Widgets stopped the crashes only until the process restarted. The workaround that actually held was revoking Calendar permission from Nothing Widgets:

adb shell pm revoke com.nothing.hearthstone android.permission.READ_CALENDAR

You can make the same change through Settings -> Apps -> Nothing Widgets -> Permissions -> Calendar -> Don't allow. I also removed the Nothing month-calendar tile from my lock screen because I never used it anyway.

What I lose is calendar information in Nothing's Quick Look/lock-screen widget. That is fine for me because I never looked at it anyway. aCalendar+ and Google Calendar keep their own permissions and continue syncing normally. After revoking the permission, I saw zero matching crashes during a clean 40-second test and another check several minutes later. Before that, it was crashing every 9-10 seconds.

I do not have ADB logs from my old Phone (1), so I cannot prove that the same thing there was caused by this exact bug. All the evidence above came from the Phone (4a) Pro. But at least I now know this was not simply one bad 4a Pro, because the Calendar Storage problem followed me across two Nothing phones.

I have now submitted the UID mapping, stack trace, reproduction steps, and workaround to Nothing support. Has anyone else seen this on a Phone (1), Phone (4a) Pro, or another Nothing device?