Fantastical is one of the best examples of what a native iOS or Mac app should be. Now, after 13 years of Apple exclusivity, it’s also available for Windows.
The Windows version of Fantastical, announced on Tuesday, has full feature parity with the desktop version for MacOS, including a pop-up taskbar view for upcoming events, natural language event creation, and calendar groups that can be quickly shown or hidden with a keyboard shortcut.
It’s a big change for developer Flexibits, whose work has always been associated with Apple platforms. Michael Simmons, Flexibits’s cofounder and CEO, says the cross-platform push won’t take anything away from Fantastical’s iOS and Mac apps, but it will allow Fantastical to reach a much larger audience.
“We decided that we’re really going to fulfill our mission of making the best calendar app,” he says. “And if we’re only on the Apple platform, we can’t do that.”
Why Fantastical is making a Windows app
Fantastical started out in 2011 as a simple Mac menu bar utility, allowing users to glance at upcoming events and create new ones by typing into a text field. Long before voice assistants and generative AI took off, the app could parse natural language such as “Coffee with Michael at 4 p.m. on November 9” and would automatically fill the corresponding event fields.
While Fantastical received warm reviews from Mac aficionados, it made a bigger breakthrough the following year by launching on the iPhone. The app, which had a slick way of scrolling through an agenda and calendar views simultaneously, got a lot of attention from the tech press and landed atop the App Store’s paid app chart, proving that iPhone productivity apps could be a real business.
Since then, Fantastical has established itself as a darling of the indie Apple developer scene. It was quick to support the Apple Watch in 2015 and won an Apple Design Award for its full suite of apps that same year. It also regularly embraces new iOS features such as Widgets, Shortcuts, and Control Center customization.
But having switched from paid software upgrades to a subscription model in 2020, Simmons sees an opportunity to boost growth with an app for Windows, which still accounts for 73% of desktop market share according to Statcounter. He’s heard from existing Fantastical users who enjoy the mobile app and want to use it on their Windows PCs at work, and he argues that the timing is right as the Windows experience has improved.
“Things like the touchscreen, and the OS, and the (Microsoft) Store, and their whole ecosystem, it feels like they’ve caught up in the sense that, it feels like you could do an app like Fantastical on their platform now, and it would probably feel right at home,” he says.
Not just for Apple anymore
All of which raises the question of whether Flexibits’ priorities will shift as its audience broadens.
Simmons is emphatic that Fantastical’s Windows version won’t take anything anything away from the Mac side, where it still offers a native app built on Objective C and Swift. The Windows app, he says, also has a native interface that Flexibits built from scratch, while using various frameworks and methods to translate some of its core calendar logic from the Mac version.
“It’s really awesome, because now, moving forward, when we develop, we can develop for all the platforms equally, and have Windows benefit with its native app,” he says.
All this may seem deep in the weeds, but the underlying code can be a point of contention when a beloved Mac app goes cross-platform. A few years ago, the popular password manager 1Password switched from a native Mac app to one built on Electron, which uses web technologies that simplify cross-platform development. That led to a backlash from users who claimed that the new app consumed more system resources and had numerous feature regressions.
Simmons is an investor in 1Password and early adviser to the company, so he’s well aware of those criticisms. While he’s not inherently against Electron and says Flexibits merely chose a different direction for its Windows app, he’s also wary of Apple users feeling short-changed. In addition to offering a native Mac app, he says Flexibits will continue to support new Apple-specific features when they make sense.
“It’s super important our users know this isn’t just a port (and that Mac users won’t suffer),” he says in a follow-up email after our interview. “Yes, I care a lot.”
Android? Never.
Just don’t expect Fantastical’s new cross-platform focus to extend to Android. Simmons says an Android app is not going to happen because he doesn’t believe it wouldn’t benefit Flexibits’s business.
As an example, he points to iA Writer’s recent decision to abandon its Android app, citing frustrations with Google, development difficulties, weak protections against fake reviews, and “rampant piracy.” (Google declined to comment on these concerns.)
“That’s one story,” Simmons says. “I could give you eight others, that you just hear, ‘We went to Android, and no one’s paying,’ or ‘We went to Android, and it’s hard to support.'”
What’s next?
Even without Windows (or Android) support, Simmons says Flexibits is doing well enough as-is. The company is still growing and now has 20 employees, up from 18 in 2022.
But at some point, he says, there’s a desire to get bigger. The Windows app is one example of that, but the idea of an acquisition is also more plausible now than it once was.
In its early years, Simmons watched a wave of competing calendar apps get snatched up by larger companies, only to watch them languish or get shut down a few years later. He wasn’t interested in selling Fantastical only for it to be unceremoniously killed off.
But now that Flexibits is showing that it can be more than just an Apple platform developer, his thinking has shifted.
“Now we’re on another platform,” he says. “Now I think this growth will be massive, and yeah, if another company or partner were to step in and were to figure out a plan to really blast this, sure, why not? The goal is to make this the best calendar app for all, so that would certainly help that mission.”
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