Your family calendar in Apple and Google — ICS subscription

If you live in Outlook all day and in FamilyBoard at breakfast and bedtime, there's been a stubborn little gap: the parent-teacher meeting you put in FamilyBoard didn't show up when your boss booked a meeting on top of it. You either copied times manually — or accepted the double-booking.

Today we're closing that gap. Calendar subscription lets you point Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook at a private URL — and every family event appears in your work calendar automatically.

What it solves

This is a thin but stubborn friction point. Most adults run two calendar worlds:

• Work calendar (Outlook or Google Workspace) — where meetings get booked
• Family calendar (FamilyBoard, ideally) — where pickups, doctors and soccer practices live

When they don't talk, this happens: your boss books a meeting at 4:30, you forget that you have to pick up Sammy from after-school care at 5, you end up driving stressed. Or: you say yes to drinks, then realise it's your week with the kids.

With an ICS subscription, your work calendar automatically knows that 4:30–5:30 is already taken. No manual double-entry.

How it works

1. Open Settings → Calendar subscription.
2. Click "Create link". You get a URL starting with https://familyboard.io/ical/... — unique to your family and containing a secret token.
3. Paste it where your calendar app wants it:
   • Apple Calendar (Mac): File → New Calendar Subscription → paste
   • Apple Calendar (iPhone): Settings → Apps → Calendar → Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add Subscribed Calendar
   • Google Calendar: Other calendars → + → From URL → paste
   • Outlook: Add calendar → Subscribe from web → paste
4. Done. Within a few minutes your FamilyBoard events appear in the subscribing calendar.

Updates flow one way: from FamilyBoard out. Adding an event in Outlook won't appear in FamilyBoard via this link (that needs separate two-way sync, which is on the roadmap). The reason is simple — ICS is a read-only protocol. That's also why it's safe.

When it's worth it

A parent with an Outlook-heavy job. You click through your day in Outlook and want pickups and doctor visits to "block" time as clearly as meetings do.

Shift workers with a roster app. The roster app already exports ICS — now FamilyBoard can sit on the same surface.

Grandparents who don't want the app. One user told us: "I don't want another app, but I want to see my grandchildren's soccer in my Apple calendar." Send them the URL, let them subscribe. Nothing to install.

Pet sitters and babysitters. Temporary read-only sharing is solvable with a URL — no account creation required.

Trade-offs we picked on purpose

ICS subscriptions get cached by client apps, often for 15 minutes to an hour. So if you add an urgent event in FamilyBoard at 1pm, it might not show in Apple Calendar until 1:30. For urgent stuff — use the FamilyBoard notification directly. We've set Cache-Control: max-age=300 on the ical_export edge function as a compromise between freshness and not hammering our own backend.

The link is also intentionally one-way. Two-way sync between calendar systems is famously buggy — duplicates, missed updates, hard-to-debug race conditions. For families the stakes are high (a missed pickup isn't a bug report — it's a child waiting alone outside school). We'll add two-way only once we can do it cleanly.

Security under the hood

The URL contains a token unique to your family and can be revoked any time in Settings. Lost control of an old URL — hit "Rotate token" and the old one stops returning data within a minute. Tokens live in calendar_export_tokens with a single RPC (create_calendar_export_token) as the only way to mint them. The ical_export edge function validates the token, reads your events, returns an RFC 5545-compliant VCALENDAR file. No passwords, no OAuth dance.

Get started

Calendar subscription is live today in the iOS app and on familyboard.io. Settings → Calendar subscription. It takes five minutes to set up and you'll never copy an event between two calendars again.