Your rating will only get worse from here – Fantastical Calendar Review

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.
Review by UnluckyKitty130 on Fantastical Calendar.