All Android Calendar Apps are Bad

My "Research" and Woes

I believe I've downloaded every calendar app on F-Droid and the Play Store (as of 7/16/25). I believe the best ones for the average user are: Google Calendar, Good Calendar, Any.do, and Proton Calendar.

But none of them fit my requirements. I want my calendar to:

Have 1st class iCal support

Be private

Have a usable UI

Just be a calendar app...

None of the "best calendars" do all of these. Reasons why as an addendum.

What are AOSP Forks?

As I downloaded these I found there were two classes of calendar "Good" and "AOSP Forks." That's a little tongue and cheek. But broadly, there were (1) proprietary calendars that had nice UI but were missing features or had privacy concerns, or (2) calendars that supported iCal, were private, were mostly FOSS, and all had the same terrible UI.

Technically there were two terrible UI. There are two big open source calendars that have been made. Android Open Source Project's (AOSP) calendar, and Simple Mobile Tools's (SMT) calendar.

I had assumed SMT's calendar was a fork of AOSP and so I call them all AOSP forks...

Neither of these Calendars are maintained by their original projects anymore. The most modern AOSP calendar is Etar Calendar, and the most modern SMT calendar is Fossify Calendar.

An Honorable Mention

Sectograph is a 12-hour pie chart of your daily events. I found the UI difficult, the lack of time zones cumbersome, and had some trouble with iCal syncing. I also wish it was open source, but this may be the best option out there for someone.

I'm using Fossify Calendar

After all that I ended up with Fossify Calendar. The UI is really bad, and I don't particularly like using it, but it works. I also find the SMT UI to be slightly less bad than the AOSP UI.

I know nothing about android development, but I wish someone could spend the time to make a better UI instead of endlessly cloning the bad ones.

Seriously though, why is search the secondary UI space in Fossify Calendar? It's difficult to get to even if I wanted to search, most events have the same name because they are recurring, and I can't search by date 😭

Addendum - why not use a "good" calendar?

Google Calendar isn't private

Good Calendar is worse Google Calendar, paid, and they send your data to Google.

Any.do is a task app first and a calendar app second. I don't need a task app I will never look at my tasks.

Proton Calendar was what I used. It was a disaster if you ever tried to manage invites with others, was relatively slow, and could be annoying at times but it was basically everything I wanted. Do to poor support and feeling like I was paying for things I didn't want I ceased to be a Proton customer recently, and with that let go of the calendar.

It also doesn't really have good iCal support.