Notion Calendar 4+

As a student, I was really excited to see this because I use notion to track all my assignments by due date. I didn’t want to switch and start tracking my assignments on another app because I have a whole system with notion. Using this calendar I can see all my assignments that I’ve already input in notion under the “All-Day” area (which isn’t the most ideal spot but it’s good).

Theoretically, this calendar could be such a great tool for students using notion, but it’s just not quite there yet. For example, I expected the ability to customize things to be on a similar level as using Notion but this version of the calendar feels a bit basic/plain. I’d love to see more customization available in different areas. For example, more colors for color-coding events (the aesthetics are fun as a student, makes everything more enjoyable).

I love love LOVE using notion calendar databases to keep myself organized with both my academics and work, so having a specific application to see all of my notion, google calendar, apple calendar, etc calendars in one app sounded amazing to me (both my job and school use different platforms to share calendar events and tasks and such.) Unfortunately this app is so limiting and just annoying to use. It only connects with google calendar, so i had to sync apple to google and google to notion, making a mess of iCal links (speaking of them, notion doesn’t allow for you to export, which would REALLY be a game changer) . Also, it doesn’t actually integrate into notion itself, and the /embed block doesn’t work for many people (including myself). Unfortunately this app makes you work for it and not the other way round :(. I do not doubt that the notion team will or is going to make advancements to improve this app’s usability, but for now it’s just not the best option. My recommendation for others reading this is to just link all your calendar databases to notion or just use an entirely different camera app.

The great thing about Notion is its interoperability. It’s clean, smooth, has a variety of methods to use, access, and work with different sources and types of data, and you can even login with any existing auth provider-like apple. So being sent an email about a new calendar app was thrilling, and discovering it’s a reskinned app called Cron which only works with google accounts and isn’t even sso with your notion account on iOS is extremely disappointing. I feel misled, especially as the website button to go to the app store page is labeled as “Download for iOS.” While I see references to it working with google cal further down, this information is not highlighted, and it feels like a simple ploy to drive initial downloads to justify company metrics, leaving users who expect basic calendar functionality (every calendar app on the market supports more than one calendar provider) to delete the app and hope for an update. This is the first time I’ve been dissapointed in the Notion team, as their app is as perfect as an app can get. An alarming move by their company.