How to share a calendar across iPhone, Android, and a school portal

Households are tech-mixed. Mine has an iPhone, an Android Pixel, a school portal that emails PDFs, a husband (me) who uses Outlook for work, and a Windows laptop nobody loves. Each one thinks it is the center of the universe. Each one has its own calendar. None of them talk to each other.

If this is your house too, the question is the same: how do you get everyone on the same calendar when the underlying tech is not on the same anything?

This post is the practical guide. By the end you will have one family calendar that pulls events from all of these sources, visible to everyone in the household. About 30 minutes of one-time setup. Then it just works.

The problem in one sentence

Each calendar app or system thinks it owns reality. Apple’s Calendar thinks the iCloud calendar is the truth. Google’s Calendar thinks Google’s is the truth. Outlook thinks Outlook is the truth. The school portal thinks the PDF it emailed you is the truth, which is actually the most accurate of the bunch because at least the PDF is honest about not syncing anywhere.

You cannot fix this by picking a winner. You cannot make your wife switch to Apple just because you have an iPhone. (You can try. It will not work. Trust me.) What you need is a layer above all of them that pulls events from each, into one shared view.

In our house that layer is Hom-I, which I built specifically to solve this problem. But the same idea works with Google Calendar’s family setup, or any tool that can read CalDAV, Google, and Outlook feeds. The tool matters less than the approach. The approach is: read from all of them, show one view to the family.

Step 1: pick the “view” layer

You need one app or tool that:

• Pulls events from external calendars (Google, iCloud, Outlook at minimum)
• Lets you share with your household so everyone sees the same view
• Works on both iPhone and Android
• Is reliable enough that you’ll actually keep using it

Your options:

Google Calendar with family sharing. Free. Pulls Google native, can subscribe to ICS feeds. Doesn’t handle iCloud or Outlook gracefully.

Apple Family Sharing and Apple Calendar. Free. Works if everyone uses iPhone, which is not your situation.

Hom-I (full disclosure, I built this). $12.99 a month for the whole household. Pulls Google, iCloud, and Outlook. Shares with everyone in your household.

For mixed-device households, the Hom-I or Google Calendar paths are the realistic options. Google Calendar with ICS subscriptions is the cheap path, but it does not pull in iCloud or Outlook cleanly. Hom-I costs money but reads all three. Pick what fits.

For the rest of this post I will walk through the Hom-I setup because that is what I know best. The general principles apply to any tool.

Step 2: connect Google Calendar (the easy one)

Google Calendar connects via OAuth. This is the painless one.

In Hom-I, open Settings, Calendar. Enable “Sync External Calendar.” Pick Google. Click “Authorize.” Sign in to your Google account. Click “Allow.”

That’s it. Within 30 seconds, your Google events start showing up in Hom-I. You did nothing else.

If your spouse uses Google too, they do the same thing on their account. Both sets of Google events appear together in the shared family view.

Step 3: connect iCloud (the painful one)

iCloud is where this gets annoying. Apple does not support OAuth for iCloud calendars. They require what they call an “app-specific password,” which is a different password you generate just for the integration.

Here is the full sequence:

Step 3a. Go to appleid.apple.com and sign in.

Step 3b. Under Security, click “App-Specific Passwords” and then “Generate Password.”

Step 3c. Label it “Hom-I” or whatever you’ll remember. Apple gives you a 16-character password formatted like “xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx.” Copy it.

Step 3d. Now you need your iCloud CalDAV URL. Apple does not display this anywhere prominent, which is annoying. The easiest source is your Mac’s Calendar app under System Settings, Internet Accounts, iCloud. The CalDAV server address is shown there. It looks like “https://pNN-caldav.icloud.com/[account-id]/calendars/[calendar-name]/” where pNN is a specific server number for your account.

If you do not have a Mac, the Hom-I docs walk through a couple of other ways to find the URL. There is also a simpler “try the base address” approach (https://caldav.icloud.com) that auto-discovers in many cases.

Step 3e. In Hom-I: Settings, Calendar, provider = CalDAV. Paste the app-specific password. Enter the CalDAV URL. Save.

iCloud events start syncing.

This setup is annoying, I know. It is annoying once. Once it works, it keeps working. You will not have to do this again unless you change your Apple ID password (which invalidates the app-specific password and you have to regenerate it; the URL stays the same).

Step 4: connect Outlook

Outlook is OAuth like Google. Almost identical setup.

In Hom-I: Settings, Calendar, choose Outlook, sign in with Microsoft, approve permissions. Done.

If you have a work Outlook, this pulls in your work events too. Be deliberate about whether you want your work calendar visible to your family. Some people do (great for “is dad in a meeting at 3?”). Some people don’t (work events feel intrusive in family space). You can connect a personal Outlook account separately from a work one, or just connect the personal one.

Step 5: deal with the school PDFs

This is the hardest part because most school portals are bad at exporting calendar data. They send PDFs, sometimes ICS files, sometimes neither.

A few options, ranked roughly by effort:

Best case: the school provides an ICS feed URL. Look in the parent portal for “subscribe to calendar” or “calendar URL.” If it exists, copy it and subscribe to it in Google Calendar (Other calendars, From URL) or Apple Calendar. Hom-I does not subscribe to raw ICS URLs itself, but once that feed is in your Google or iCloud calendar, Hom-I pulls those events into the family view automatically.

Middle case: the school exports an ICS file you can download. Download the latest one, import it into Google Calendar or your family calendar tool. You’ll have to do this whenever the school updates the schedule (annoying, but only a few times a year).

Worst case: the school sends PDFs. There is no automated solution. One parent has to manually enter the events. Block out 20 minutes once at the start of the school year, copy the major dates (PD days, conferences, breaks, field trips) into the family calendar, and accept that this is the price of having a school district that hasn’t caught up.

In our house, we set aside one Sunday in August to go through the school PDFs and put everything into the calendar. It takes 30 minutes per kid. We do not look at the PDFs again that year because everything is now in the calendar.

Step 6: invite the household

Once events from all sources are flowing in, invite the rest of your household.

In Hom-I, this happens in Settings, Household. You generate an invite link and send it to your spouse. They sign up using the link, and they’re added to your household automatically. Everyone now sees everyone’s events in the shared view.

If they want to connect their own external calendars (their work Google, their personal iCloud, etc.), they do the same OAuth or CalDAV setup we just walked through. Their events join the shared family view.

For kids: they probably do not need their own account. The events that involve them get added to the family calendar by you or your spouse. If your kid is older and uses a calendar of their own (school Gmail, etc.), you can sync their account in too.

Step 7: confirm it works

Walk through a sanity check after setup:

Add a test event in Google Calendar. See it appear in Hom-I within 30 seconds.

Add a test event in Apple Calendar (on iPhone or Mac). See it appear in Hom-I within 30 seconds.

Add a test event in Outlook. See it appear in Hom-I within 30 seconds.

Add a test event directly in Hom-I. Confirm it shows up in the family view (it should, instantly).

If any of these don’t work, double-check the credentials. The most common failure mode for iCloud is an expired app-specific password. The most common failure mode for Google or Outlook is that the OAuth token expired, in which case Hom-I will prompt you to reconnect.

A note on direction of sync

A quick clarification because this confuses people.

Every connected calendar (Google, iCloud, Outlook) syncs into Hom-I. That inbound direction always works: events you add anywhere show up in the family view.

The outbound direction (events you create in Hom-I getting written back out) works for Google and Outlook, but you pick one of them as the target. In Settings you set a “default calendar for new events.” New events you create in Hom-I land there, and deleting them removes them there too.

iCloud is inbound only. Apple’s CalDAV does not let Hom-I create events back in iCloud, so events you add in Hom-I stay in Hom-I (and in your chosen Google or Outlook calendar, if you set one). Your iCloud events still flow in fine.

The school portal: read-only. School events come into your family calendar, but you cannot edit the school’s calendar from Hom-I.

This means you do not have to “switch” to Hom-I as your primary calendar tool. You can keep using Google, iCloud, or Outlook directly, and those events flow into the shared family view. Or you can switch fully to Hom-I as your primary, which some families prefer because it keeps the mental model simple.

What this gets you

Once it is all set up, here is what changes:

You stop asking “is anything happening Saturday?” The family calendar answers in one second.

You stop double-booking. The view shows conflicts immediately.

You stop forgetting school events because they were in a PDF you stopped looking at in October.

Your spouse, who is on Android, sees the same calendar you see on iPhone. No “you didn’t tell me about this” arguments.

The shared family calendar becomes the household’s source of truth. Every other calendar feeds into it. None of them are competing.

Dad jokes, because tradition

Apple and Google walk into a bar. Microsoft says, “I’m already here, you’re late.”

iCloud and Google are getting along better than my kids, which is a low bar but I’ll take it.

Why did the calendar break up with the to-do list? Because the calendar was too scheduled and the to-do list was always pending.

Want the tool that does all this

If you want a tool that handles Google, iCloud, and Outlook in one shared family view, Hom-I does that. Free for seven days, no credit card. $12.99 a month for your entire household after. You can try it at hom-i.net.

Or build the equivalent with Google Calendar plus ICS subscriptions, which works fine if everyone in your house uses Google. The point is to stop fighting the technology and let one tool pull from all the sources.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to manually type fourteen field trip dates into the calendar from a school PDF. The price of the modern family calendar is sometimes paid in PDFs.