Published on
October 03, 2023
2 min read
Ryan Brodie
Founder & CEO
2 min read
Earlier this year, we launched Onin as the privacy-first social calendar, designed to make sharing plans with friends delightful. Users love its ease of use, helpful reminders, chats organised by event, keyboard calendar, and of course its industry leading end-to-end encryption.
Despite this social focus, our most passionate and loyal users are actually couples and families. As a firm believer in building for what people do vs ask for, today we’re doubling down on this userbase and releasing our two most requested features: shared calendars and repeating events.
But we’re not just releasing our biggest ever feature update today, we’re also launching as OurCal.
We’re proudly a shared calendar app and want our brand to reflect this. Our rebrand, developed entirely in-house, embraces our calendaring, sharing, and security elements.
Before OurCal, sharing calendars as a couple or family involved dozens of steps and the results meant you still missed changes made in these calendars. Inbuilt messaging is also sorely lacking from existing providers making communicating around events challenging. We’ve reimagined this setup process into shared calendar groups eliminating all such previous pain points.
Groups provide a shared calendar for the group as well as individual shared calendars for each member. This setup means seeing each others schedules is now a breeze.
As privacy is at the core of everything we do at OurCal, every member also has a private calendar that is only ever visible to them. When you create an event in OurCal you always feel confident with who you’re sharing it with.
Your group’s calendar is for general plans and you can create unlimited additional calendars for specific purposes like hobbies, kids, or bills.
And all of this—your profile, group, calendars, events, and messages—is protected by our industry leading end-to-end encryption. No one has built a shared calendaring service that is this helpful and secure out-the-box. Our team has always been incredibly passionate about the importance of calendar privacy, and that is only strengthened in our focus on couples and families: your shared calendar contains the keys to your life, it deserves the upmost protection.
Just like in Onin before it, OurCal embraces messaging but with one key upgrade: event threads. Instead of each event having its own siloed chat, chats are now organised by calendar and each event is a thread within this calendar chat.
The net result is a far more organised and less overwhelming experience. You still never miss an update or message but now you can never message in the wrong place.
The ability to make events repeating was sorely lacking in Onin. With OurCal, we’ve solved this with powerful repeating events options on every event.
OurCal brings back to life one of Onin's most loved features, the Keyboard Calendar. The extension helps you check your shared calendars and add events in any app, without leaving the conversation. It works in every app.
All these exciting updates necessitated a brand new architecture which means Onin accounts aren’t compatible with the new OurCal app. Onin users can download OurCal, invite their partner or other family or group members, and start sharing calendars straight away.
Feedback for OurCal has been incredibly exciting. This is reflected in our average rating of 4.8 stars across App Store's globally. In light of this, Onin will be shutting down on the 23rd November 2023. This will allow our team to focus on building the most delightful and private shared calendar for couples and families.
Onin users can now export all their Onin events to an external calendar. To do so, simply open the latest version of the Onin app and you will be guided through this process. Then, in OurCal, you can easily connect your external calendars and move any events that you'd like to share with your group to an OurCal shared calendar.
OurCal is available now from the App Store and Google Play. Set up your couple, family, or group today.
Any questions, feedback, or thoughts? We always love hearing from you, drop us an email at hi@ourcal.com.
4.9/5
4.8/5
Published on
Sep 26, 2023
2 min read
Ryan Brodie
Founder & CEO
Earlier this year, we launched Onin as the privacy-first social calendar, designed to make sharing plans with friends delightful. Users love its ease of use, helpful reminders, chats organised by event, keyboard calendar, and of course its industry leading end-to-end encryption.
Despite this social focus, our most passionate and loyal users are actually couples and families. As a firm believer in building for what people do vs ask for, today we’re doubling down on this userbase and releasing our two most requested features: shared calendars and repeating events.
But we’re not just releasing our biggest ever feature update today, we’re also launching as OurCal.
We’re proudly a shared calendar app and want our brand to reflect this. Our rebrand, developed entirely in-house, embraces our calendaring, sharing, and security elements.
Before OurCal, sharing calendars as a couple or family involved dozens of steps and the results meant you still missed changes made in these calendars. Inbuilt messaging is also sorely lacking from existing providers making communicating around events challenging. We’ve reimagined this setup process into shared calendar groups eliminating all such previous pain points.
Groups provide a shared calendar for the group as well as individual shared calendars for each member. This setup means seeing each others schedules is now a breeze.
As privacy is at the core of everything we do at OurCal, every member also has a private calendar that is only ever visible to them. When you create an event in OurCal you always feel confident with who you’re sharing it with.
Your group’s calendar is for general plans and you can create unlimited additional calendars for specific purposes like hobbies, kids, or bills.
And all of this—your profile, group, calendars, events, and messages—is protected by our industry leading end-to-end encryption. No one has built a shared calendaring service that is this helpful and secure out-the-box. Our team has always been incredibly passionate about the importance of calendar privacy, and that is only strengthened in our focus on couples and families: your shared calendar contains the keys to your life, it deserves the upmost protection.
Just like in Onin before it, OurCal embraces messaging but with one key upgrade: event threads. Instead of each event having its own siloed chat, chats are now organised by calendar and each event is a thread within this calendar chat.
The net result is a far more organised and less overwhelming experience. You still never miss an update or message but now you can never message in the wrong place.
The ability to make events repeating was sorely lacking in Onin. With OurCal, we’ve solved this with powerful repeating events options on every event.
OurCal brings back to life one of Onin's most loved features, the Keyboard Calendar. The extension helps you check your shared calendars and add events in any app, without leaving the conversation. It works in every app.
All these exciting updates necessitated a brand new architecture which means Onin accounts aren’t compatible with the new OurCal app. Onin users can download OurCal, invite their partner or other family or group members, and start sharing calendars straight away.
Feedback for OurCal has been incredibly exciting. This is reflected in our average rating of 4.8 stars across App Store's globally. In light of this, Onin will be shutting down on the 23rd November 2023. This will allow our team to focus on building the most delightful and private shared calendar for couples and families.
Onin users can now export all their Onin events to an external calendar. To do so, simply open the latest version of the Onin app and you will be guided through this process. Then, in OurCal, you can easily connect your external calendars and move any events that you'd like to share with your group to an OurCal shared calendar.
OurCal is available now from the App Store and Google Play. Set up your couple, family, or group today.
Any questions, feedback, or thoughts? We always love hearing from you, drop us an email at hi@ourcal.com.
Onin is a secure calendar app for your personal and social life. The app is currently invite-only as we gradually roll out early-access to our waitlist. For regular updates, follow us on Twitter.
