Calendars by Readdle for iPhone and iPad review

By Leanna Lofte
last updated

Calendars by Readdle is an alternative to the built-in Calendar apps on the iPhone and iPad provided by Apple. It features a gorgeous interface, intuitive controls, seamless syncing with Google and iOS calendars, and more. If you find yourself commonly frustrated with Apple's Calendar apps, you'll definitely want to consider Calendars by Readdle as a replacement.

Calendars includes 5 different views: list, day, week, month, and tasks and all of the views can be used in both portrait and landscape orientation. The week view and day views are my favorite as they give a visual representation of what your days look like.

When using week view while in portrait orientation, each scheduled event is represented by a colored square with the time and title. If you have more than four events in a day, a small dot will appear at the end of that day's row indicating that you can scroll the individual row to see more. In landscape, the days become the columns and the rows represent time. At the bottom of the screen, you'll find intervals of days that you can scroll though, or you can simply swipe the screen to move forward and back between weeks. Want to move an event? Simply hold your finger on it and drag it to where you want it to be. If you want it on a different week, drag it to the edge of the screen and you'll be taken to the next week (similar to moving apps between pages of your home screen). Day and month views behave similarly.

The day view is very similar, only it breaks up the day into 24 rows, one fore each hour of the day.

The month view moves away from blocks to represent events, and simply lists them out in the appropriate color for each day. In portrait orientation up to three events will be listed on each day (with an ellipsis to represent if there is more) and in landscape, only two events will be display for each day, but more of the letters of the titles of the events will be visible.

It doesn't matter what view you're in when it's time to add an event. You can either tap the plus sign in the upper righthand corner or simply hold your finger down in the place you want it added.

In the event creation/edit screen of Calendars, you can add all the typical information: name, calendar, time, reminder, location, repetitions, etc. However, what really sets Calendars apart is its special keyboards. For example, when you create event, you are immediately taken to the Title field and the keyboard pops up -- a keyboard with an extra row. The top row includes four reminder time options: 5 min, 15 min, 1 hour, and 1 day. This makes is really easy to quickly add an event without fiddling around with different options. Another custom keyboard is for selecting the event time; instead of scrolling through dates like many apps have you do, Calendars pops up a calendar that makes date selection really quick.

One of the disadvantages to Apple's built-in Calendar apps in iOS is that you have a limited number of choices when it comes to scheduling a repeated event. For example, If you wanted to add your math class that meets during the same time on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, you can't. With Calendars by Readdle, though, you can!

The good

  • Drag & Drop for events
  • Day, Week, Month and List view
  • Support for custom repeating events
  • Special keyboards
  • Sync with Google or iOS Calendar
  • Manage your calendars online and offline
  • Invite people
  • Get SMS reminders
  • Search events
  • Universal for iPhone and iPad

The bad

  • Swiping through month view on the iPhone is glitchy

The bottom line

Calendars is an excellent calendar app for the iPhone and iPad. It's beautiful, intuitive, and full-featured. My only complaint is that there isn't a Mac app available to complete the trio!

$6.99 - Download Now (opens in new tab)

Leanna Lofte
Leanna Lofte

Former app and photography editor at iMore, Leanna has since moved on to other endeavors. Mother, wife, mathamagician, even though she no longer writes for iMore you can still follow her on Twitter @llofte.

18 Comments
  • How does it compare to Calengoo?
  • I'd like to know, too. I like CalenGoo, but there are some things about it that could use improvement.
  • Well, Calendars has much better UI and more intuitive to work with.
  • When adding a contact to an appointment does it send the invite the same way the built in calender does? I need something that will send invites properly through Outlook. I am using Agenda now, but have been having an issue with it not staying in sync and I am looking for alternatives. But that is a must for me.
  • Invites are for Google Calendar only, so if you are using Google Calendar with Outlook, it will probably work fine, if you're using something else, it probably won't :(
  • Yeah, it does support invites the same way Google does.
  • Need details on the Task view, please. If it can sync and display Task data with my work Exchange and personal Outlook.com accounts, then I may be able to overlook the outrageous $7 price tag.
  • I don't have an exchange account, so I can't test it, but Readdle advertises it as being for Google tasks, so my guess is it won't be satisfactory for you :(
  • Have a look at Week Calendar. It's the most powerful calendar app I've seen yet and I believe it's only $4.99. I use it and love it.
  • I second week calendar. I use my calendar to manage my work and personal life and week calendar has been the perfect app to contribute to that calendar management on my iPhone. The best part of the app is that it is simple on the surface but has enough settings to make a hardcore calendar user happy.
  • I like Week Calendar too, it's native and fast. But for me it fails at being able to add multiple alerts to events in Google calendar. The fact that Google is trying to phase out syncing via EAS and enforce only CalDAV for iOS devices makes Calendars by Readdle a perfect solution for me. Not only can you create multiple alerts (more than two, up to five like via the native Google calendar interface, be it either email, popup or SMS) for any event, the way calendar is set up, it doesn't depend on EAS but works directly with Google, so it works around that limitation. The bad, or better, it would be nicer if this app wasn't HTMLy/JavaScripty, but more of a native app, but for the functionality offered, I don't see any other iOS app that can touch it, native or not. Also it would be nice to have the pretty icons for events that Week Calendar has.
  • My apple calender stopped syncing thru the cloud about 4 days ago, tried everything,
    spent several hours and talked to many experts, no luck. I have since learned that a lot of people are having this problem.
    Anyway I went looking for a reliable replacement, I found this and it does work very well.
    I had to go thru and create a new calender in google because i had never used it before and since my apple cal was not syncing, I had to start from scratch. It does work nice and syncing to Google is fast. It is worth the cost Mazon
  • Hey there's a misspelling in the second sentence, I believe you want it to start with "It" not "I".
  • Thanks. Fixed.
  • Nice review. I've been using Agenda, which I love except for one thing: there's a very noticeable delay every time I open the app (or switch to it if it's already open) while it syncs with Google Calendar. The entire app is unresponsive until it finishes syncing. Does this app suffer the same fate, or can you scroll around in the app while it's syncing?
  • Calendars syns seamlessly with Gcal. No worries here.
  • If you're looking for an excellent Mac app, I highly recommend FantastiCal. It's really excellent, and I particularly love how they've implemented Apple's reminders into it. I have yet to find a great iOS calendar app. Agenda thinks the world didn't exist before 2011, and they'll probably drop 2011 from your calendar there soon too! SHEESH. They consider their lack of previous data a 'feature' kind of like how running your car into a tree is a probably a feature to them too in that it stops you. Also, they place event dots far enough above the date (instead of below) that the dots look like they belong to the previous week. ...? It's a shame because, for the most part, Agenda is superb, but where they get it wrong they REALLY go out of their way to get it wrong. And then there's Calvetica. The scrolling calendar is FANTASTIC!!! ...but the geniuses who created that app decided to gray out the past, so it's hard to see what you're looking at when you scroll back. Did they do this because they can't think of a better way to show that you're looking at dates in the past? REALLY? Yikes. Hey, developers: Here's a better idea: See that vertical text to the left that says "Oct 2012"? Have it change to match the months while scrolling forward OR back. Then you'll have no need to gray out the past. Problem solved. You're welcome.
  • Does it support appointment templates? For appointments that are regularly scheduled on a one-off basis, such as periodic meetings or doctor appointments?