A calendar should be a calendar again

Calendars on Android have spent a decade getting heavier. The app opens on a promotion strip, a feed of suggested content sits between appointments, the permission list grows every release, and nobody can say with confidence where the data ends up. Fossify Calendar walks the other way. It is the continuation the original Simple Calendar team started after that project changed hands, with the code published openly, a GPLv3 licence, storage kept on the device, no collection of user information and no permissions beyond what a calendar needs.

The interesting part is not the ideology but the fact that the app is usable. A calendar that is private and clumsy is a museum piece; people keep it for a week and drift back to the one that nags them. What makes this one worth a look is that the restraint sits in the plumbing while the surface stays ordinary.

Privacy is minimal, the feature set is not

Saving data locally did not cost features. An event takes an exact start and end, repeat rules cover the usual patterns, and reminders can be layered so the first warning arrives a day early and the last one ten minutes before. Alarm sound and vibration pattern are adjustable per reminder, which matters for anyone who shares a bedroom or an office. Day, week, month and year views switch without losing the appointment you were reading, birthdays and public holidays import in one step, and the home screen widget comes in enough shapes and colour themes that it stops looking like a system leftover.

Sync is where the project is unexpectedly generous. It speaks the standard calendar protocol, so services that support it connect without an account being handed over, and a phone change becomes a protocol migration rather than an export and import ritual. Nothing about the design locks a user to one vendor, which is exactly the point.

Version notes and where it comes from

The current stable build is 1.10.3, released in 2026-02, and it fixed a crash when the phone was rotated into landscape among other things. That detail is worth mentioning because it says what kind of project this is: small, frequent corrections rather than a rewrite every year. The wider family covers more than 10 apps, among them a gallery, a file manager and an address book, all following the same rule of no tracking and no advertising. Distribution stays conventional as well, since the project points people at open source app stores where the published build and the published source correspond.

What you give up, honestly

A local calendar does not sync itself. If two phones and a laptop must agree without anybody thinking about it, that is a setup job rather than a default, and the project would rather you know that than discover it later. Some conveniences of the big platforms, like invitations arriving in a shared inbox with a smart suggestion attached, are simply absent. For a person whose calendar is a personal record of where the day goes, none of this is a loss.

A calendar is one of the more revealing files a phone holds. It records the appointment at the clinic, the interview that has not been announced at work yet, the days a child stays with which parent. None of that is a secret in the dramatic sense, and all of it is nobody else business. A tool that asks for contacts, location and usage statistics to display a list of dates is asking for a great deal in exchange for very little, and the permission dialogue rarely explains what the exchange actually buys.

The value of Fossify Calendar is not one more feature but one less calculation: no promotion slots, no data collection, no permission grab, and open code that makes all of it checkable. If the goal is a lighter phone and a locked front door, changing the calendar is a reasonable place to start.