I maintain an application that extracts calendar events from Google. The API that I use is this:
GET https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/calendarId/events
This generally works fine but I've come across a situation where one of the events that I receive has supposedly been deleted from Google, at least the UI does not show it on the user's calendar. The event in question is a recurring, daily event. It was deleted by the user and replaced with a new one, with the same event title and recurrence pattern, but there were a few differences in the attendee list and meeting link. The above API gives me both the deleted event and the replacement.
One odd thing is that if I specify "singleEvents=true" on the API, then the individual instances that I receive only come from the replacement event, not the deleted one. So somehow the internal code that retrieves single events knows that the first event is deleted. Unfortunately this is not a good workaround for the application.
This really seems like a Google bug, but I'd like to hear any suggestions that people might have, thanks.
To date, Google hasn't released a fix to stop deleted events from appearing in Google Calendar API results.
The only workaround that you may do as of now is to set singleEvents to true or set showDeleted to false.
submit a Feature Request to Google using this link, detailing the need for a workaround to this current limitation.
See how to create an issue in the Google Issue Tracker.