Our smartphone comes with many in-built apps, and we hardly notice them. Most of them are useful, like an in-app calendar. Calendar is often viewed as an essential app to have in your smart devices. All of us like to save events, schedules, meetings, see any upcoming festivals, and what not in the calendar. But what you should know is that getting a calendar into an app is not a simple task, because of the technical reasons.
Today’s crowd demands a user-friendly and delightful user experience. As per sources, customer experience will surpass price and product as the brand’s competitive advantage. Hence, become making any decision, think twice on how to feature your app to match customer requirements.
Therefore, to provide a creative experience, you’ll have to consider technologies like voice recognition, augmented reality, and optical character recognition. This article will focus on many in-app calendar use cases so that you can make the best choice.
In-app calendar use cases
Let's explore which apps use calendars and how you can execute an in-app calendar for a specific use case.
Healthcare & Fitness apps:
Scheduling doctor appointments is the most usual function of calender in healthcare apps. An app called Healthfully assists doctors study to observe their patients' health conditions. Apart from scheduling in-person and online doctor appointments, other calendar features include scheduling reports and notifications. Fitness apps like Talos use detectors and NFC tech, and help users plan training sessions due to in-app calendars.
Parking apps:
SpotHero, the platform that helps drivers reserve parking areas minutes before parking or months before traveling. SpotHero Calendar sync enables iOS users to sync with iCalendar and select the specific calendar to integrate with SpotHero. This makes a user's events available in the app, allowing them to tap on an event and book a parking area for a particular time.
Event discovery app:
Eventbrite, a platform to discover various events, has an in-app calendar that clients can sync with their Apple, Google, and Outlook calendars. These apps remind clients of events they have tickets to through push notifications. Clients can be informed when the speakers are on stage during a seminar or what a musical band performs for an entire day.
Educational apps:
Online courses and educational platforms use calendars for organizing lectures, Q&A sessions, and home projects. The client will get notified when an essay deadline day is approaching or one hour before their next talk starts. Calendar integration with Outlook and Google Calendar helps amateurs remember their lectures by including them to learner’s personal calendars.
Messaging apps:
Telegram allows the users to send scheduled texts by holding the SEND tab in a chat and selecting Schedule Message. The text will be sent automatically at a particular time. The users can use their saved texts chat to convert planned massaged into reminders.
Streaming apps:
Apple Music allows users to hear the scheduled programs. The platforms such as SoundCloud enables the musicians to plan their track and album launches.
Rental apps and Real estate apps:
Rental apps like Zumper and real estate apps like Zillow have in-app calendars for time management and plan meetings with real estate agents and property owners. Real estate apps, like HomeSway, offer a home tour experience with the help of its integrated calendar feature.
Calendar APIs available;
Microsoft, Google, and Apple provide their own calendar APIs that can smoothly integrate with web apps and mobile apps.
Microsoft’s Outlook calendar API offers access to calendars, events, groups, and reminders on desktop, web, and mobile apps. Outlook.com guarantees family sharing, so clients can include family members to their account, thus making their calendar accessible to others.
The Google Calendar API assists RESTful calls and provides users libraries for multiple programming languages--- JavaScript, Python, Swift, Java, and others. The Google Calendar API enables modify personal calendars, set up notifications and reminders, and look for and display shared or public calendars in web and mobile apps.
Apple’s EventKit system permits you to access and regulate calendars, reminders, and events on macOS and iOS gadgets.
For example, the Slice Planner app was built with the help of three APIs (Microsoft, Google, and Apple) Slice Planner clients can move hand-scripted events to the online calendar and integrate them with events from other online calendars.
As
top app developers, you can use various other APIs for your assignments. Below are a few APIs that can come handy to you while developing your app to meet your client requirements. Note that these APIs are compatible with both web apps as well as mobile apps.
Funambol API: integrates your calendar across many gadgets and to the cloud.
31Events API: allows you to send invites to clients, gets reports on events, and sync with other apps.
Calendarific API: provides public holiday information for different countries.
Cronofy API: assists you pull free hours, plan tasks, and integrate third-party calendars.
SuperSaaS API: provides online appointments planning, notifications, reports, and schedule payments as well.
Below are a few best open-source calendar libraries for web, iOS, and Android.
For web-based apps, there are various options to select from. If you like a user-friendly and tailored solution without support, you can think of options like Fullcalender.io and Tui calendar. For something more intricate, you can use Kendo UI & the Mobiscroll responsive calendar.
Now, for Android-based apps, you can consider choosing feature-rich CalenderView, Cadar, and AgendaCalendarView libraries.
Lastly, for iOS-based apps, you can think of using FSCalender or JTAppleCalender. Developers praise these apps for permitting you to design highly customizable calendars with awesome designs.
You can use UICollectionView to develop your custom calendar UI for iOS, thus overseeing and organizing an ordered collection of data items and displaying them using tailored layouts.
Conclusion:
Building an integral calendar and integrating it into an app might sound simple. However, as an app development company, your clients might demand unusual or unique features to the app, which can be pretty complicated. By counting on calendar services and following best practices, you can integrate a calendar in your app easily.