Fantastical Calendar Reviews

Great Application

Markdpy

Many years ago I tried earlier version of this program. I was not a fan. However, I wanted to try it again. Wow! The entire format changed, along with its appearance. It is easy to use and efficient. I have tried about all calendars from App Store. This is definitely the winner now! I do not mind paying the $4.99 a month. It helps me control my days and effectiveness. I suggest you give it a try for free month. It is well worth it!!

Please allow us to disable natural language parsing

Shutter41

Great app for viewing your calendar. Terrible app for entering events. Natural language parsing may be useful for some people, but for others it is purely a hindrance with absolutely no option to disable it. Please please please let your users choose what works best for them and provide an option to disable natural language parsing. The developer response is that quotation marks can be manually added each time an event is entered to disable the parsing, but this is not a reasonable solution as it adds extra work on each entry. Adding a preference to disable parsing entirely is still the correct thing to do to let users choose for themselves how they want to use their calendar.

Will try again later.

a ninja muffin

**iOS 15 update** Decided to give it another shot after an entire iOS update was pushed. Tried multiple times, but could not get my watch to get past the login screen. Too much bloat for this to work nicely without major troubleshooting. **iOS 14 update** Now with iOS 14, the exact same problem is even more apparent as my review below. The new widgets barely show any information, while the native calendar app is cleaner, less cluttered, and has smaller text to simply display more information. **iOS 13 - Fantastical 3 update: I bought this app for it’s widget; The compact nature and that you could see a monthly view was the entire reason I bought Fantastical 2. Fast forward to the Fantastical 3 release, I’m happy that all of the same functionality is available to me. I’m not a power user, so the new features are not for me. However, the update has brought in this bloated layout. Text is bigger. Spacing is larger. The compact nature that I was initially happy with is gone. The widget takes up so much space when you have multiple events on any give day. It’s a real disappointment. Why try and change something that worked so well?

Money grubbing evil devs

bromide992

Stop nag screening me on software I already purchased. I’m not making a “flexibits account” so you can claim you’re a cloud provider and SaaS me to death you greedy excuse for a legitimate development company. This is exactly the kind of thing why you have low ratings and no one likes your stuff anymore.

Your rating will only get worse from here

UnluckyKitty130

Please read this review carefully as I’ve added a lot of information. First of all, before I dive into the cons, let me just say that the UI of this app is great. Visually, they’ve done a good job spacing things out, and the front-end developer did a good job on this one. But… that’s where the good ends. Now let’s talk about the bad. The app has many problems that make me wonder why they never came into thought while developing it, here’s a few: 1) On iPhone you can’t zoom in, so the events just get blocked by other days 2) The event names dont wrap-around either, making only part of the event title readable- to see the rest you need to click on the event 3) The “add event” button pops up a view that takes up the whole screen, something that looks really unpractical on the iPads- this could’ve easily been solved with a small pop-up menu like in the default calendar app 4) When you add a new event, you can’t visually drag it in- you need to type it, something that’s a big problem when moving from the regular calendar app to Fantastical. The regular calendar uses a simple drag-and-place function, something that’s so much simpler and visually helpful to see what you’re doing. And then, there’s the subscription. I’m going to be very blunt: This subscription is undoubtedly one of the worst models I’ve ever seen, and is utterly pointless. There is no reason whatsoever why you need a subscription, other than the developers making more money- and the features that do need a subscription are pointless as well. First of all, what do you even *need* that comes with this subscription? Behind the paywall, there’s “interesting calendars”, new views, and weather (and a few other things). Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, should have to pay to see a weekly or monthly view of a calendar. This is one of the biggest- if not THE biggest point of a calendar, to see everything at a glance, and the developers locked it behind a paywall. The interesting calendars cost money to run, which is one of the main reasons there’s a subscription- to keep this service running. But it’s nothing more than a few sports shows, tv, and finance. And when you decide to add one, it takes up most of the screen on your calendar, which (especially the ‘Week Numbers’ calendars) clutter your schedule with things that you’re better off organizing yourself. The weather is another useless feature- of course you need to pay to keep AccuWeather’s API going, and that’s another reason the developers use a subscription model. But there’s no point! It’s a few symbols next to each day, and the rest of the info takes you to AccuWeather’s website. It clutters up the calendar, and switching to another weather app entirely to check the forecast is much easier than this. I will give them credit to the design of integrating this feature, it’s very appealing, but still useless. And all of this would be justified, except if the developers hadn’t been so greedy to push everyone into this new subscription model. Everywhere you look, it’s either blurred out or locked, telling you that the only way to use this part of the app is through a subscription. If you wanted to get people to buy your stuff, you should’ve let people take their time instead of chucking it at their face. If there’s one thing the developers should take away here, it’s that your subscription needs to either be altered to add more things, or just remove it entirely. The features that come with the subscription are mostly useless and don’t need to be paid for, it’s not worth using all these API’s for an app like this. Remember, it’s just a calendar app. You don’t need all these cool perks added, just focus on making the features you already have better. What you should’ve done is keep the old version of Fantastical as a standalone app, and then make this app the new version. Heck, you can even make a version right now that’s a one-time purchase. Even being a new user to the app (only a few days), the price is way too high to pay per month and per year, it’s so expensive to pay for a calendar. Just look at Notability’s issues they’ve been having in the past few days, and then look at how Things 3 runs their own cloud service while still keeping their app a one-time payment. Bring back the old pay-once-and-keep-forever model, or else your app is going to fall into a deep hole of critical reviews (it already is). And eventually you won’t be able to get out.

Glitchy, Bad Support, Not Enough Value For Subscription Price

Bo Stansell

I’ve tried to reach out to support for technical issues and got no responses, the app has frequent bugs (like missing items in search), and the subscription price is hardly worth it considering there are free options that are just as good if not better. Don’t waste your money.

Need Paid Subscription to Monthly View of Calendar

Doyouknowsean

I paid full price for this app previously, but it has since changed to a subscription base service with basic features such as viewing yoru calendar in day and month views no longer available without a subscription. Unless you are willing to pay the monthly subscription, the non-subscription version simply doesn’t have many of the basic functions as the native iOS calendar to make it worth using.

Moved behind a paywall.

Stephanie from Chicago.

I just opened this app after a while to discover its a paywall now. I’m deleting it. I paid for it and now have to pay again for features that I could access before. Done.

appearance issue

rehr22

love the app and have been using for many years. The only issue I have is with dark mode and light mode not changing immediately, it only changes the second time the app is opened after iOS has changed from dark to light or vice versa

Can’t access my account on iPad. Just stick with iOS native.

rafahansen

I’m a premium user and the google login functionality doesn’t allow me to login - it doesn’t load the required page for google’s credentials. Will need to stop using the app. It is not the first time that some serious issue makes me unable to use the app for a couple of days. Tired of this this time. And it is not that much better than the native app that works flawlessly.

Fantastical Calendar Reviews – Page 2