I both love calendars and find myself increasingly frustrated with them. An ideal calendar situation would allow me to add events on my work laptop, personal laptop, and iPhone. I also want to view events on my iPhone and Apple Watch widgets. With this requirement Google Calendar is out of the picture. It just doesn’t work. I tried it for over six months, the syncing is too slow and requires opening the app on iPhone in order to get it to propogate to the wigets. 

Apple Calendar is the clear default here, but my work events come through on Google Calendar. When I setup my laptops and phone to allow for creating events I kept running into sync issues. An event I added on one laptop wouldn’t show up on the other. An event added on mobile wouldn’t show up on desktop. It just takes 2-3 times for this to happen for someone to completely mistrust the entire tech. 

So I simplified things.

I only add events on my mobile phone. It’s annoying and slow because I don’t have a proper keyboard, but it’s the source of truth I can trust. Whenever I add laptops back into the mix I seem to run into sync issues again. 

The biggest friction from all this comes in when I need to schedule a personal event with multiple people outside Google. Apple’s calendar invite just does not seem to work. I send out invites and hear from people that they never got them. 

I hope there’s a way to improve this going forward, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.