Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

The sun sets on Sunrise Calendar

sunrise sunset calendar
Image used with permission by copyright holder
It was a long time coming. Shortly after Microsoft acquired Sunrise Calendar, the company said it would incorporate most of the calendar’s features into Outlook, and then shut down the service.

We now have an exact date for Sunrise’s sunset — August 31.

“The entire Sunrise team is now working side by side with the Outlook team and it’s a thrilling moment for us to work on an app of this scale,” the Sunrise team said in a blog post. “Unfortunately, as all good stories go, there’s a sad bit to it: we’re not able to support and update Sunrise anymore. No new features. No bug fixes.”

To discourage people from downloading the app, so as not to disappoint them further, the Sunrise team will be pulling its apps from the App Store and Google Play in the next few days. If you have it downloaded or if you’re using Sunrise on the web, the service will still function until August 31.

The team says it’s working hard to bring many of Sunrise’s best features to Microsoft’s Outlook calendar — and you can see them being incorporated already. Microsoft unveiled Calendar Apps earlier in April, which brought support for a number of apps, like Evernote, Facebook, and Wunderlist, to Outlook.

For those of you who are dreading Sunrise Calendar’s inevitable demise, you do have a little more than three months to switch to something new, and we’ve put together a few apps that are good alternatives.

For iOS

Moleskine Timepage ($5)

Moleskine-Timepage_
Moleskine, the company famous for its journals, released a calendar app last year that went on to be one of Apple’s “Best of 2015” apps. This gorgeous app gives you an endless timeline view of your events, as well as a heatmap overview of the month that displays the days you are least busy. Best of all, the app also offers weather updates, as well as travel estimates to your events.

iTunes

Fantastical 2 ($5)

Fantastical-2-iPad
Fantastical 2 is another award-winning app that offers a solid design experience. Apart from scheduling events, you can also add reminders as well as geofences for when you arrive at a certain location, or when you leave it. Fantastical also has a pleasant month-view widget, which makes it easy to see upcoming events at a glance. And it makes it dead easy to add an event — if you don’t want to bother with time dials or anything of the sort, just type out what you want and the event or reminder will be scheduled. Fantastical has a great Mac client that offers a solid desktop experience as well.

iTunes

For Android

Google Calendar

Google Calendar
Google Calendar is the default calendar app on stock Android devices, and for good reason too. The app is also available for iOS, and it features a polished Material Design, and has features like Goals, reminders, and event integration from Gmail, and it also has Exchange support. You can view your events however you like, whether through Schedule, Day, 3-Day, Week, and Month. Of course, Google Calendar also has a solid presence on the web for desktop users.

Google Play

iTunes

Today Calendar ($3)

Today calendar
This beautiful calendar app has continued to stay popular on Android — likely thanks to an active developer who repeatedly adds new features that leave users wanting more. Sure, it closely resembles Google Calendar, but it adds a lot more features you didn’t know you wanted, like AMOLED mode, themeable design, a sleek widget, and more.

Google Play

Editors' Recommendations

Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
The Pixel 7’s best camera trick is coming to the iPhone and all Android phones
Erasing items in Magic Eraser.

The Google Pixel series of phones, specifically the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7, have an exclusive feature called Magic Eraser. With Magic Eraser, you can get rid of unwanted objects in a photo, such as people in the background or things like power lines. As of today, Magic Eraser is becoming available to all Android phones and iPhone users through Google One.

Magic Eraser debuted on the Pixel 6 lineup, which includes the Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, and the more affordable Pixel 6a, which is still available to purchase (the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro have been discontinued). If you have a Pixel 7 or Pixel 7 Pro, you also have the Magic Eraser feature. One of the reasons I had always wanted a Pixel device is because of Magic Eraser, and it is something that I desperately wished Apple would implement.

Read more
My iPhone 14 Pro camera is ruined, and it’s all Apple’s fault
The iPhone 14 Pro's camera module.

Every year, Apple touts the iPhone as having an incredible camera system — and, yes, the hardware is certainly impressive. The iPhone 14 Pro has the latest advancements that Apple offers in terms of camera upgrades, including a huge jump to a 48MP main camera with pixel-binning technology (four su-pixels to make up one larger pixel), a telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom, faster night mode, and more. Again, on the hardware front, the iPhone 14 Pro camera looks impressive. And it is!

But what good is great camera hardware when the software continues to ruin the images you take? Ever since the iPhone 13 lineup, it seems that any images taken from an iPhone, unless it’s shot in ProRaw format, just look bad compared to those taken on older iPhones and the competing best Android phones. That’s because Apple has turned the dial way up on computational photography and post-processing each time you capture a photo. It’s ruining my images, and Apple needs to take a chill pill and take it down a notch.
These 'smart' features aren’t as smart as they claim

Read more
5 things the iPhone has to change in 2023 before I ditch Android
iPhone 14 Pro with a black always-on screen.

The iPhone’s operating system is many things, but perfect is not one of them. It’s been two years since I shifted to using an iPhone as my primary device, but I still use an Android as my secondary smartphone. And if I weren’t invested in the Apple ecosystem, I would have ditched my iPhone a long time ago.

I have been hoping desperately for iOS to get better at some things Android has been doing for years. For instance, I love scrolling through Twitter while watching a music video on YouTube. I can do this simultaneously on an Android thanks to multiwindow support, but iOS only offers picture-in-picture at best.

Read more