Honor 8 fix push notifications, calendar and contacts sync

I have Honor 8 phone ordered from China (FRD-AL10) because the black version with 64GB was not sold in Europe (at least I was not able to find it in european shop).

Calendar and Contacts sync issue

The downside of this phone is that google play, google contacts sync and google calendar sync are not installed by default. You have to install them by yourself, you can download them for example from apkmirror (http://bfy.tw/AJnQ, http://bfy.tw/AJnR, http://bfy.tw/AJnU).

The installation of these apks is just the first part. To make the synchronization really working you need to give those applications proper rights - access contacts, calendar and make sure they they are not closed when the display is locked (battery management).

Push notifications not working

I'm not sure if I had this issue since the beginning or if it started after upgrade to Android 7.0 nougat. The problem was that after some time of locked display I was not getting messages to messenger (WhatsApp, FB Messenger). 

I gave these applications different rights in applications settings and notification privileges in notifications settings and made sure they are not killed when display is off in battery saving settings, but it still didn't help. 

After a while I found the setting which was causing this trouble - Connection during sleep. Honor 8 default settings is trying to save battery a lot. That is cool, thank you Huawei. But the fact that somebody can't send you a message or call to a Messenger/WhatsApp, that is pretty bad (NO thank you at all).

After enabling "Keep WLAN on during sleep" and "Keep mobile data on during sleep" I started recieving messages even when my phone was idle.

Pretty obvious when you know this setting, but not that easy to find when you don't know what you are looking for. 

On my Honor 8 with Android 7 nougat it's in Settings -> Battery -> (top right) Gear icon - Connection during sleep section

Notifications only when app is manually started

Another thing which I've learned is that not all applications are able to recieve push notifications when they are not visible in the recent apps. I though that all applications which are recieving push notifications will be running on the background as a service by default because it made sense to me, but it's not like that.

For example Gmail is notifying me about new e-mails even if I don't start it manually.
But this is not how WhatsApp works, at least not on my phone. I have to start it manually and let it run on the background (it must be visible in the recent apps).
Good thing is that it's easy to disable recieving messages when I don't want to be disturbed, I can just remove it from the recent apps. It's just important to know that it works like that.

There is a setting named "App auto-launch" on my phone which I tried to turn on for WhatsApp, but it made no difference for me.

Finally

Finally I can fully enjoy this phone. Overall it's a really cool phone - it looks good, it works fast, it makes great photos and in the end messenger apps are working as they should. 

If the google synchronization and messenger apps would be set by default in a way that they actually work, I could even recommend this phone to somebody else ...