Why would I want to put my calendar info into a third party account? It seems the main advantages are not needing to use iOS Mail to reply to event requests unless I’m missing something.
Also I’d sure love an option to get rid of all the premium teaser elements. Those get old quick.
No, you get all the same apps, but you can only use your Setapp subscription on one computer, whereas usually you can use it on two computers.
Good to know. I did see that specifically emphasized somewhere on the landing page “one computer,” but I had assumed that was always the case.
I think the Watch App requires the Flexibits account to operate - though from what I hear it DOES NOT require the premium subscription (but I could be wrong there).
And regarding the data on another server, what does this even mean then:
Same here. Watch app does not work (upgraded, Flexibits account, no subscription).
I looked up how it works and they can’t read your data. it’s end-to-end encrypted using the key they show you when you create the account. Each device uses the local key to decrypt the sync data. Flexibits | Privacy Policy
They should make a bigger deal of this in-app because it’s a really good decision and exactly what people want from sync/communication services right now.
You mean “discounted upgrades” or “free upgrades” - moving from v1 of an app to v2 is an upgrade, whatever you pay.
And, somehow, Omni, for example, has managed to implement discounted upgrade pricing. It’s not as simple as it should be - you install the free version. If the older version is still on your device, upgrades to the Pro version are cheaper.
Let me just note that Flexibits have “upgraded” my Fantastical to v3 without notifying me and I no longer have a Watch app. Thanks, Flexibits.
Has anyone had an issue receiving invitations to a Google-based calendar in Fantastical 3? I was only able to get one from another Google calendar to show up in the Mac app, and it took a few minutes. Invitations from an iCloud calendar never show up. Both show up instantly in Calendar and Google Calendar. Periodically I see sync errors between the Google Calendar not receiving notifications in the notifications for the iPhone app only.
I also contacted support about it.
How can I start the free 14 days trial without entering my creditcard info?
(But still use their yearly plan on the web in the future, if I like the Premium features after all)
(From Flexibits | Fantastical for iOS | FAQ)
As many people noted, this makes it sound as if Flexibits is logging into your calendar account and is delivering push notifications directly to your Watch. (I don’t think they are doing that.)
This was a downside of the cellular Watch, if used stand-alone and away from the iPhone, for example when on a run, you wont’t get live updates on your appointments.
This however isn’t possible if they only store the login credentials fully encrypted on the flexibits account, as they claim.
But then I don’t get it. Why would this require a Flexibits account at all? You don’t switch your calendars on an hourly basis. You pick a calendar provider, set it up and forget about it. The account logins can be shared with the Watch via the iPhone to Watch sync.
The only edge case, where it would be cumbersome to set it up, is if somebody has a Watch and either uses the iPad or the macOS version of Fantastical, but does not use an iPhone. Admittedly that is a far fetched preparation, because a fully stand-alone Apple Watch does not yet exist. And also I’d argue that at that point iCloud sync to the Watch will exist so credentials could be shared via that.
The only other reason to force free users with no intent to go premium into having an account is to have means to upsell you on the subscription.
Good point. Whatever the merits of a move to subscription, Flexibits have handled this very badly - your software updated and the features changed without warning; lack of clarity on the effects of the changes; requirement to set up an account to maintain the functionality you had beforehand. None of these are good.
And all this for a calendar app?
Yes, it does seem like they have a separate method to deal with Watch data; it’s the only device they say has its e2e-encrypted data in the cloud instead of on-device like the others. I’m not familiar with how Google push notification authorization works, but it sounds like the flexbit account is needed to quickly receive push notifications from Google, and then to push notifications to devices, which then use their locally stored Google credentials to get the actual data. And the phone handles the notification to the Watch since it’s not totally independent even if cellular, and pushes the e2e-encrypted data to the cloud for the Watch app to pull down with the key.
Definitely complicated, but it seems they are doing things correctly from a technical perspective. I really like how thorough they explained it, though they could probably do better with callouts and high-level summaries.
Losing your Fantastical 2 Watch app functionality is really annoying though; hopefully that’s a fixable regression.
Some key quotes:
- Event and task data synced to your Apple Watch is stored on Flexibits servers. This data is end-to-end encrypted and we are unable to access it.
Fantastical uses end-to-end encryption to sync your calendar sets, templates, interesting calendars, Apple Watch data, and account usernames. End-to-end encryption ensures that nobody but you can access this data.- Your Flexibits Account Key is used to [retrieve] your data when it is stored on a Flexibits server. Your Flexibits Account Key is stored on iCloud to make it easy to sign in to other devices that use the same iCloud account.
- When using Google, Exchange, and Todoist push updates. No event data is ever sent to Flexibits, our servers only receive a notification that changes were made on your account. This notification is then relayed to Fantastical.
I went ahead and give the 2 week trial a try. Yes, it’s good that they now have what they called a full screen Day View, which is exactly what is shown in the screenshot above. But, it’s still not as intuitive as stock calendar app, which has a week picker at the top, so I could easily swipe to go to the following week and see my calendar for next Thursday.
And the fact that I still go back to stock iOS calendar speaks volume of Apple’s stock calendar’s feature set, which met my requirement at zero cost.
I’m sorry Fantastical, but nope, no subscription for me.
I get a pop up on my iPhone that calendar autocomplete is a Fantastical Premium feature, but in v2 I could use “/rel” to add an entry to calendar “releases”.
Bug?
Alright, I wasn’t aware of your enterprise data
Same here!
Interestingly it still works if I use my old Shortcut to create an entry that schedules an appointment in my calendar by appending “/coaching” to the processed phrase.
Not released in my locale yet, but I wonder what the “surprise” is.
Same here…
Who already knows?
Updated on macOS (UK) to 3.0.1 and there’s no perceived dfference. I was expecting a “What’s new” screen at least.
I exchanged tweets with the developer regarding this. They confirmed that, if you are updating from v2 on the phone, the additional “watch calendars” set to be synced to the watch is grandfathered in; you only need to subscribe if you want calendar sets (on iOS) beyond that. However, there is a bug with the watch app in 3.0, which is causing data sync issues — they are working on a fix.
Another thing that is confusing (it confused me for a while) is that different feature sets were present in v2 on different platforms, and after the update, you can continue using them for free on the same platform only. E.g., multiple calendar sets are still available on the Mac after the update, but not on iOS, and same goes for full screen displays. (On the phone, still, you get the full-screen week view by rotating to landscape — same as it ever was.)
