Connected calendars

Calendars connect in both directions, and each direction is its own choice:

• Bring a calendar in. Connect your Apple, Google, or Outlook calendar, or any calendar that has a private link, and its events appear in the family calendar and on Today.
• Send the family's events out. Have the hub copy the family events you can see into a calendar of its own in your Apple or Outlook account, so they sit beside your own events on every device.
• Subscribe to a feed. Add one private link to any calendar app and it shows the family's events, read-only.

Everything here is under Settings → Calendars on the web. Each member connects their own calendars. Guests can't connect or subscribe to household calendars.

1. Open Settings → Calendars and choose the kind of calendar to add.
2. + Apple Calendar: enter your Apple ID and an app-specific password. Make one at appleid.apple.com under Sign-In & Security → App-Specific Passwords. Your normal Apple password won't work here, and you never need to give it to us.
3. + Google Calendar or + Outlook / Microsoft 365: sign in with that account and allow the hub to read your calendars. Outlook works with a personal Outlook.com account and with a work or school account; some organizations ask an administrator to approve new apps first.
4. + iCal URL: paste a calendar's private link. This works with any service that offers one, including Fastmail and Proton Calendar, and with the calendars schools and sports clubs publish.

The hub reads each connected calendar about once an hour, and keeps events from two weeks back to about eight weeks ahead. Sync Now reads it straight away. Reading never changes anything in your calendar.

Events brought in this way are visible to the members of your household, not to guests. If an account has things you'd rather keep to yourself, keep them in a calendar you don't connect.

If a calendar shows Sync failing, the hub can no longer sign in to it, usually because an app-specific password expired or access was removed from the account. Use Reconnect to sign in again; the connection keeps its name. For an iCal URL that has changed, disconnect it and add the new one.

This works with an Apple or Outlook calendar you connected yourself.

1. Under Settings → Calendars, find your connected calendar and turn on Also send my hub events to this calendar.
2. For Outlook, Microsoft asks you to allow the hub to add events. Approve it and you're returned to the same page.
3. Within the hour, a new calendar named Chickadee Bandit appears in that account, holding copies of the family's events. A large calendar takes several hours to copy the first time.

A few things are worth knowing about how it behaves:

• It only touches its own calendar. The hub writes to the Chickadee Bandit calendar it created and nowhere else. Your other calendars are never changed.
• You get what you can see. The copy holds the family events you can see in the hub. An event that is private to someone else isn't sent, and one that is later deleted or made private is removed from the copy.
• The hub's version wins. Edit events in the hub. A change you make to a copy in your calendar app is replaced the next time that event changes in the hub.
• Only you can turn it on. It's your account, so it's your choice. A household admin can turn sending off for a member, but not on. If someone else connected the calendar for you, sign in to it yourself with Reconnect first.
• It keeps up by itself. New events and changes arrive within the hour, often sooner.

The copy holds events created in the family calendar, from a month back to a little over a year ahead, with their title, time, place, notes, and repeats. Events brought in from other calendars are never sent back out, so nothing is duplicated. Events that other hub apps add, such as carpool pickups, are in the feed described below but not in this copy.

Events with a time need a household time zone. Until one is set, all-day events are sent and timed events are held back, because the hub can't say what hour they fall at. The switch offers to use your browser's time zone if you're an admin; otherwise ask an admin to set it under Settings → Notifications.

The copies carry no alerts of their own, since the hub sends its own reminders. A small number of unusual repeating events, such as one that repeats monthly on the 31st, can't be described exactly to every calendar service. Those are left out of the copy rather than shown on the wrong days; they stay as they are in the hub.

If you use Google Calendar, or would rather not let the hub write to your account at all, use a feed instead. Under Subscribe from your phone on the same page, tap Generate feed URL, then add that link in your calendar app under "Subscribe to calendar" or "Add calendar from URL".

The feed shows family events and the events other hub apps add, and never your own connected calendars. It's read-only, and your calendar app decides how often it checks for changes, which can be several hours.

Anyone with the link can read the family calendar, so treat it like a password. The page shows roughly when it was last used. If that wasn't you, replace the link, and the old one stops working.

Turning off sending removes the Chickadee Bandit calendar from your account, with the copies in it and anything else you added to that calendar. The events themselves stay in the hub.

Disconnect removes the events the hub brought in from that calendar and deletes the sign-in details we stored. If the hub was sending to that account, the Chickadee Bandit calendar is removed too. For Outlook, you can also withdraw the access you granted in your Microsoft account.

If the hub can't reach the account to remove its calendar, for example after an app-specific password was revoked, it tells you so, and you can delete the Chickadee Bandit calendar in your calendar app.

Sending and feeds pause while a household's subscription isn't active. Nothing is removed for seven days; after that the Chickadee Bandit calendar is taken out of your account. Your choice is kept, so renewing brings it back with a fresh copy.

Our privacy policy covers what we store for a connected calendar and who holds the copies once they are in your account.