Popular calendar app Fantastical lands on Windows

Buzzy calendar apps tend to make a big splash and disappear after a while. Sometimes they get acquired, sometimes the company pivots to something else. That’s not the case with Fantastical, a popular calendar app for macOS, iOS, and other Apple platforms. Originally launched as a Mac app in 2011, the team behind Fantastical has made the app better, update after update.

Over the past 13 years, Flexibits, the company behind Fantastical, also launched its calendar app on other Apple platforms. You can check your next calendar events on your Apple Watch. You can also plan the next quarter in Fantastical on the Apple Vision Pro if you need spatial computing to focus on your calendar.

On Tuesday, the company is releasing Fantastical on Windows. And if you’re already using Fantastical on a Mac, you’ll feel right at home: It’s basically the same app.

“We’ve been working on it for the last three years. It is everything. It is the last 13 years of Flexibits,” co-founder Michael Simmons told TechCrunch. “In other words, as we’ve added new things to the Mac and iPhone in the last three years as we’ve developed this, we’ve also brought it to Windows.”

Fantastical lets you add all your existing calendar accounts to a single app; it supports Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and iCloud accounts for instance. After that, you can see all your personal and work events in the same calendar interface.

“We all use Apple products, and we love Apple products. But for the mission that we’re really trying to achieve, which is better productivity for everyone, fast and friendly apps for all, I think being on Apple ignores a large amount of users that are at work on Windows PCs,” Simmons said. “And we know that the market for Windows PCs is a huge market.”

“And to be real, I always was like, ‘I’m not making a Windows app.’ I don’t use Windows. Why would I make a Windows app? But throughout the years, I realized it’s not about me using Windows, it’s about customers who can’t access Fantastical using Windows. And then I thought of Fantastical not as an Apple product, but as a product we make,” he said.

In Fantastical, you can also create calendar sets to show and hide specific calendars depending on what you’re looking for. Fantastical offers several well-designed views, including the “DayTicker” view, which lets you see an infinite river of events with a small scrolling calendar at the top.

A popular feature among Fantastical users is that you can use natural language to create an event. For instance, you can type “Lunch with Tim Cook on Tuesday at Caffè Macs on Apple’s campus”. The app will parse that request and create a one-hour event around lunchtime on Tuesday with “Caffè Macs on Apple’s campus” as the event location and Tim Cook in the invitee list.

For advanced calendar users, Fantastical also has a Calendly-like feature called Openings. You can also use Fantastical to create an event link with an RSVP feature for your next birthday party.

And if you have a lot of conference calls, Fantastical automatically detects conference call links in calendar invites and creates a join button in the event list so that you can join in one click.

All of these features are available in the Windows app. Going forward, apps on all platforms will be updated at the same time so that the company can retain feature parity across all platforms.

As some people use a Mac at home and a Windows computer at work, they’ll be able to use the same app on both computers now. Some Fantastical users also started with the iOS app. But they have a Windows laptop. Now, they can also use Fantastical on their PC.

Fantastical is free to download and use but you have to pay a premium subscription to unlock all features for Fantastical and contact management app Cardhop, another app from Flexibits. The premium subscription unlocks access to premium features across all platforms, including Windows. The price isn’t changing with Tuesday’s release; Flexibits Premium currently costs $4.75 per month when billed annually.

Does it mean that Flexibits is going to release an Android version next? Probably not. “I don’t think we would do Android. I feel that market doesn’t get what we’re doing,” Simmons said.

In the last couple of months, several indie app makers have complained about Google’s relationship with indie developers. For instance, iA Writer, a Markdown document editor, is no longer available on Android as Google now requires an expensive security audit from KPMG. Transmit, a file transfer app for macOS, no longer supports Google Drive for more or less the same reason.