Notion Calendar 4+

As a student, I was really excited to see this because I use notion to track all my assignments by due date. I didn’t want to switch and start tracking my assignments on another app because I have a whole system with notion. Using this calendar I can see all my assignments that I’ve already input in notion under the “All-Day” area (which isn’t the most ideal spot but it’s good).

Theoretically, this calendar could be such a great tool for students using notion, but it’s just not quite there yet. For example, I expected the ability to customize things to be on a similar level as using Notion but this version of the calendar feels a bit basic/plain. I’d love to see more customization available in different areas. For example, more colors for color-coding events (the aesthetics are fun as a student, makes everything more enjoyable).

The great thing about Notion is its interoperability. It’s clean, smooth, has a variety of methods to use, access, and work with different sources and types of data, and you can even login with any existing auth provider-like apple. So being sent an email about a new calendar app was thrilling, and discovering it’s a reskinned app called Cron which only works with google accounts and isn’t even sso with your notion account on iOS is extremely disappointing. I feel misled, especially as the website button to go to the app store page is labeled as “Download for iOS.” While I see references to it working with google cal further down, this information is not highlighted, and it feels like a simple ploy to drive initial downloads to justify company metrics, leaving users who expect basic calendar functionality (every calendar app on the market supports more than one calendar provider) to delete the app and hope for an update. This is the first time I’ve been dissapointed in the Notion team, as their app is as perfect as an app can get. An alarming move by their company.

First of all, I got annoyed instantly right when starting to use the app. It’s almost impossible to hold and drag to create an event of a specific length, and trying to drag an event from one day to one directly next to it is almost impossible without it jumping multiple days. It’s too sensitive and jumpy.

Also, I generally expected a lot more from the app considering it required an invitation just to use it. It basically feels like a dumb downed Google Calendar clone. Unless you just like the design of Cron better, there’s no reason to use it over Google Calendar, or Apple Calendar, for that matter, in its current state. It needs more features to differentiate itself.