I’ve been working on my privacy setup and breaking away from Proton. There are a bunch of email providers I looked at, same with email aliases, password managers, etc.
But I don’t understand the state of calendars. It feels like they’re always shoved into email services, and they’re all so crappy looking.
I was able to find one or two Android apps that are open source, and they look like they’re 20 years old.
Proton Calendar, for all its faults, looks really good.
Why, in 2025, is there no simple calendar as a service with nothing else included? And why do the UIs all look like complete trash?
I don’t get it. Can’t one of us hire an intern to take a week to learn a CSS framework and create a decent calendar UI? Am I missing something?
i use etar with caldav server and i think it works well meow
Etar works flawlessly with my nextcloud but OP might not like it much because it does look like it’s 20 years old.
Gnome calendar is working well for me on desktop, except for a weird bug re: GMT flagged subscribed calendars and the ongoing/upcoming pane to the left. It’s just showing those calendars in GMT and since I can control the display color I can handle it.
I imagine, it’s just not sustainable to offer a service only for calendar. Not many people would pay for that. And offering it for free is tricky, because you are dealing with personal data and therefore need quite a few security and legal precautions.
All the UIs look they way they do GOS there really isn’t many other ways u can do it.
Haven’t used it in forever, but seems like Thunderbird’s was alright back in the day. I heard the project died, but then Mozilla brought it back? Not sure the deets on that.
But why moving away from Proton? Did they have a bad audit or something?
A looong time ago Mozilla had a dedicated calendar app called Sunbird. It was really good and I was stoked about the whole animal theme thing.
Thunderbird does work as a calendar client, but just in desktop. Not Android.
I’m moving away from Proton for two reasons: the CEO posted a tweet commending Trump and spreading misinformation, and I’ve been pretty unhappy with the direction of company in general. They spend time creating crypto wallets / shoving AI into email instead of focusing on basic UX on existing products.
I’ve always thought the Tuta calendar looked kinda spiffy. Been thinking about giving it a shot to compliment my Proton setup. (Eggs in one basket and all that)
But I don’t understand the state of calendars. It feels like they’re always shoved into email services, and they’re all so crappy looking.
Outlook’s been built like that for a long time, and I assume that maybe groupware predating it might have done that.
kagis
@[email protected]’s take sounds pretty plausible.
Email has been widely-deployed and available for a long time and it provides an asynch messaging mechanism, which calendering needs if you’re using in a company to schedule events and do invites.
You could have some kind of separate piece of software that’s just authorized to access your mail and uses it for communication, but then it doesn’t have the ability to grab messages from the calendaring system before you might see them.
I’d guess that if someone is just using an individual calendar, they may not need a way to do invites the way one does at a company. Probably do need some kind of mechanism to do notification, though.
