Calendar Apps that Show "Other" Dates from Contacts

TidBITS Talk
1

I cannot find a solution to this calendar-contacts issue, so I am writing to seek guidance from the TidBITS community.

Do any iPhone calendar apps tap into yearly dates that exist in our Contacts app entries – other than birthdays and anniversaries?

The default Apple Calendar includes the ability to show Birthdays on the calendar. BusyCal includes the additional option to Show Anniversaries Calendar.

But do any calendar (or alternative) apps have the ability to show all the other annual dates preserved within Contacts? This could include a friend’s child’s birthday within the friend’s contact card. Or the anniversary date of a relative’s death within their contact card. Or the birthday of a colleague’s pet rabbit, Fluffy, within the co-worker’s contact card.

The iPhone Contacts app lets users input other dates, but the information seems to just sit in obscurity. Are there any apps that provide the ability to publish those other dates into calendars?

2

I can’t help, sorry. I do want to thank you for posting this, because I hadn’t known that I could add an anniversary or other date to a contact card. I had just been doing it in the contact notes.

And I don’t mean to derail the thread, but does anyone know how to get Contacts to honor the system settings for date format? Nothing I can do will budge it off mmmm d, yyyy.

3

Just noting that Fantastical can also show anniversaries in both macOS and iOS, but I’ve confirmed that it cannot show “Other” dates.

4

I use Google Calendar and all Google Contact dates are displayed on Google Calendar as all-day events.

Dates on my Google Contacts include: birthday, anniversary, and death. And all Google Contact dates are displayed every year on Google Calendar.

I don’t use a Mac-based calendar.

However, I sync my Google calendar to my iPhone’s Apple Calendar.app. As a result, all the birthdays, anniversaries, and deaths from Google Contacts are displayed as all-day events on my iPhone.

I presume that syncing Google Calendar to macOS would also have the effect of displaying Google Calendar dates on your Mac’s Apple Calendar.app too.

Be forewarned that Google Calendar’s default labeling may not give you intelligible results . Suppose that you put Fluffy’s birthday on your colleague’s Google Contact. Be sure to add a custom label on the Contact something like “Rabbit’s Birthday” or else it will show up on the Calendar as a date for the colleague, not Fluffy.