Meet your new favorite calendar app for iOS

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The one app to rule them all. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
The one calendar app to rule them all. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
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Update: This story has been modified to more accurately describe the sync capabilities of Fantastical 2, and we’ll have a how-to up on getting Google and iOS to play nice soon.

Readdle’s calendar app, Calendars 5, brings all the natural-language and sync goodness of other high-end calendar apps, along with support for your Google or iOS calendar, to your iPhone and iPad at the same time in one $3 app. Plus? When you add an event to Calendars 5, it shows up on your Google Calendar (or iOS Calendar if you roll that way).

Two-way sync? Natural-language event creation? iOS Reminders support? Recurring events? Invitations? Apple or Google Maps integration? Works offline or online?

This is gonna be your new favorite calendar app, if it isn’t already.

The built-in Calendar app on your iPhone and iPad is OK, I guess. It syncs with your Mac if you want it to, and will import third-party calendars from Microsoft and Google.

If you’re an avid Google Calendar user like myself, however, you might find it kind of lacking. Getting Google calendar to sync both to and from your iPhone is a little tough, and some of the settings are both buried and non-intuitive.

The killer feature is the direct login for trouble-free two-way sync between Calendars 5 and Google Calendar.

I’ve relied on the amazing Fantastical 2 app on my iPhone, which pulls in Google Calendar data just fine and doesn’t need to always be online to see the calendar events. It’s a beautiful, well-designed app that does what it says it does. The problem has always been that I was unable to get my iOS settings to fully synch my Google calendar, which is what Fantastical 2 uses to populate its own calendar. If you’re unable to make the iOS settings work — which are anything but intuitive — you’re kind of stuck. I was able to see events I created on the web, but never get events I created on my iPhone to show up on the web.

When I checked out Calendars 5 today, though, I discovered that it has a direct login to Google, bypassing all the issues I’ve had in the past. Hoorah! It meets all of my calendaring needs and then some. It syncs with your iOS Calendar (which syncs with your Mac’s Calendar app, so it’s all seamless) or Google Calendar, and will bring in your iOS Reminders as well, as tasks you can check off as you go about your day.

The killer feature, as far as I’m concerned, is the full two-way sync between Calendars 5 and Google calendar. After a direct login to Google via the Calendars 5 app, I created an event on my iPhone this afternoon, and it appeared on my iPhone, my iPad and my Google calendar, which I usually access via the Web on my laptop. It’s slick, requires only a login to Google Calendar, and just works.

The natural-language event creation is great too. I was able to type in “Meet Daniel for jam session at 8:30 pm next Tuesday” and Calendars 5 put that into my calendar. No spinning dials or tapping in start and end times — it’s just that simple. You can even use your voice to create events with your iPhone’s built-in voice dictation.

List view is pretty fantastic, as well. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
The List view in Calendars 5 is pretty fantastic as well. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Getting around the calendar is easy enough, with pleasant layouts for both portrait and landscape views. A simple tap on the top Menu button lets you choose a Task, List, Day, Week or Month view, and these all move around depending on the orientation of your iPhone screen. Tap along the bottom to switch days in Day view, or weeks and months in the other views. If you use the Task features in this app, they’ll auto-sort into Today, Upcoming and Completed Lists. Undated tasks show up in the All tasks list, making this a fairly robust to-do solution as well as a calendar.

Ultimately, I’ve replaced Fantastical 2 on my iPhone, not because it’s bad (it’s really great), but because making it work required a ton of settings tweaks in iOS that, frankly, most folks don’t have time to figure out. Having Calendars 5 on my 6 Plus as well as my iPad makes me a very happy integrated camper, but it’s the simple, non-Settings involved two-way connection between Google Calendar and Calendars 5 that really sold me on the app.

If you’re sold on it, too, you can get your own copy right now (for iPhone and iPad) for a respectable $2.99.

If you want to check out Fantastical 2 for iPhone ($1.99), or iPad ($4.99), you can do that as well.

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