Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Calendar currently requires you to use its web interface for sharing calendars with others.
- Calendar on Android could soon let you invite new users to view your calendars directly from your phone.
- You could also pick up the ability to unsubscribe from shared calendars right in the app.
Google Calendar already represents a fantastic way for us to keep on top of our busy lives, making it a snap to not just sync all your appointments across devices, but also to share your schedule with friends and colleagues. We just checked out some of the changes Google is working on to make it easier to manage multiple calendars, and now we’ve found some further progress along that line, as well as hints at a revamped interface.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
This time we’re looking at the new 2025.03.0-717318681-release build of Google Calendar, and while you won’t see any of these changes in that version of the app on your own phone just yet, we’ve been able to activate a few of these in-progress changes for an early peek at Google’s progress. Let’s start by looking at some of this visual makeover. In all the images you see below, we’re doing comparisons with the current UI of Calendar on the left, and the work-in-progress changes we were able to trigger early on the right.
One of the themes we notice across a few of these changes is the use of colored elements over more of the screen in a way that feels like it helps with contrast. That extends to thicker lines breaking up your calendar grid, with curved corners that further make these borders stand out.
Google also seems to be looking at dialing back the app’s brevity, and taking full advantage of screen space by spelling out more of the names of all the days of the week, instead of the single-letter representations we have now.
Beyond those, we’re also seeing development on new tools related to working with multiple calendars. Right now, Calendar on Android lets you choose which of the many calendars you have access to you want displayed, letting you limit clutter if you’re working with a lot of events. And while you can toggle that view on and off for each, you can’t permanently unsubscribe from them, as you can with Calendar on the web. But that could soon change, if Google follows through with the new “Unsubscribe” option we were able to surface.
Similarly, at the moment we need to pull up Calendar on the web in order to share any of our calendars with anyone else. But a future “Shared with” setting in Calendar on Android could let us invite other people to check out our calendars, right from our phones. We see an interface for choosing the users we want to share with, and the ability to remove specific users from that group. Alongside this, the settings screen is also experimenting with some iconography that could help a little with usability.
The UI tweaks seem like a minor improvement, and we could really take them or leave them. The calendar sharing controls, however, feel like an oversight that we’ve already been waiting far too long to see addressed, so here’s hoping those go live sooner rather than later.