@zedsq To be fair, the Mac Calendar app has the advantage of being subsidized by your purchase of Apple hardware. I'd imagine it takes a lot of work just to make something on par with Calendar.
With that said, BusyCal indeed doesn't seem to offer much over it.
@sfzhu I guess my issue is that we are seeing a ton of innovation with email clients. I love my CloudMagic client while Polymail is helping to redefine email as well. I gladly paid for Cloudmagic which was reasonably priced and it solved a lot of problems for me. I have yet to see a Calendar that has the same effect. Regardless of how it's subsidized, Innovation is innovation. Sunrise has proven that.
@zedsq
You say "Regardless of how it's subsidized, Innovation is innovation." As a consumer, it totally fine to say that — that's how capitalism works! However, if you want to talk about why apps in certain markets are successful and why certain others aren't, it definitely does help to look at all the details. And when you look, you see that email and calendar both have to play catch-up to the pre-installed apps so much, only to find a niche consumer base. (And yes, I consider Cloudmagic and Polymail be used by only a niche consumer base – just wait a few years and see if these apps are still around.)
"Sunrise has proven that." Have they? I think most of us agree that Sunrise is great, but they probably were not sustainable; otherwise, they probably would have not agreed to be bought by a company that eventually killed their product.
Competition is good, but the high turnover rate of mail and calendar apps has shown that it's hard to be sustainable – you're using apps free courtesy of VC money, but VC money won't last forever.
What's funny is that Apple's Calendar and Mail apps might owe their success to open standards – ICAL, IMAP, POP, SMTP, and friends; otherwise they'd only support much fewer mail providers. Perhaps Apple owes it to the developer community to open source their a larger portion of their app codebase?
If you're on Mac OS and/or iOS, this is the only calendaring app to use. So easy with robust features, and a very responsive support team. I just wish there was a WatchOS app so I could use Busy Cal on my Apple Watch.
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