Nearly three years ago, on October 2, 2023, we launched OurCal with one belief: the problem with calendars isn’t productivity. It’s communication. Calendars had spent forty years learning to schedule and somehow never learned to talk. So we built a shared calendar where every action is a message.
Today OurCal is trusted by more than 100,000 groups in over 150 countries, holds a 4.7 rating across thousands of reviews, and has been named Editors’ Choice on the App Store three years running. And this week we shipped our biggest release ever, with a new brand to match. I want to take a moment to explain where it all landed, and why we now call OurCal what it has always been: a calendar messenger.
What 100,000 groups taught us
When you build a shared calendar, you imagine busy parents juggling school runs. What you get is far richer than that.
One family created a care calendar to coordinate appointments and care for their mother during her cancer treatment: in their words, it made everything “simple and stress free for all of us”. A Deaf couple with a hearing toddler use it to know, in advance and with certainty, where everyone will be. Rossella, a paramedic, shares her rota with her family so nothing gets planned on the days she can’t join. A local wheelchair rugby team arranges its training, fixtures, and socials on OurCal. Long-distance couples plan surprise dates around each other’s schedules. Friend groups who could never pick a date now can.
You can read these in their own words in our Stories. The pattern across all of them is the same: the calendar was never the hard part. The hard part was the conversation around it. Who moved what, who knows, who’s coming, what was decided. Every one of those stories is really a story about communication.
A calendar messenger
That is why we’ve stopped describing OurCal as “a shared calendar with chat”. Chat is not a feature we bolted on. It is the architecture. Every event has its own thread. Every change posts to the group automatically. Photos, decisions, and “running 10 minutes late” all live with the plan they belong to, not scattered across a group chat three apps away.
This release makes that idea physical. On iPhone, the messenger literally lives behind the calendar: swipe, and the drawer opens, with every group’s activity in one feed. On iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro it becomes a sidebar that sits beside your month. Calendar and messenger, one surface.
Encrypted like a messenger
Privacy came with that decision, not after it. When we decided OurCal had to be built on messages, we looked at the messaging apps we trusted with our own conversations. Every one of them was End-to-End Encrypted. So ours had to be too. And by natural extension, so did all of the calendar data: every event, every title, every location. If the plan and the conversation live together, they deserve the same protection.
End-to-end encryption sounds technical, but the idea is simple: your data is scrambled on your device, travels as meaningless text, and is only unscrambled by the people you share it with. Watch it happen:
Three years on, OurCal remains the only shared calendar with ANSSI-certified End-to-End Encryption. No ads, no tracking, ever. Your plans belong to your group, and to nobody else. Read exactly how OurCal’s encryption works.
The new brand
Our new icon says it in one shape: a calendar fused with a chat bubble. You’ll see the new mark, our new blue, and the drawer itself across the app, the App Store, and ourcal.com, where you can now open the drawer yourself, right on the homepage.
A brand refresh is easy to do for its own sake. We did this one because the old brand undersold the idea. OurCal doesn’t look like a productivity tool because it isn’t one. It’s where your favourite people organise life together.
Smarter, still on your device
The release also brings OurCal to Siri AI, so you can say “create a dentist appointment for Annie next Thursday at 3” and it simply appears, and a new Form Assistant that fills in an event from a sentence, a flyer, or a screenshot. All of it runs on device. Intelligence and privacy are not a trade-off, and we intend to keep proving it.
The full details are in the 2026.9.14 release note.
Thank you
To every family, couple, team, and friend group who has trusted us with the most personal data there is, the shape of your daily life: thank you. Three years in, it still feels like day one of something much bigger. The calendar met the messenger. Now we get to show the world what that makes possible.
Ryan
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