Looking For Calendar I Can Customize

[loader]

I'm looking for suggestions of Android calendars that allow you to remove/add specific holidays. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

 

[Dannydet]

I've not come across any that let you pick and choose your holidays.
Only option is holidays on or off.

 

[mikedt]

Most device's stock calendar apps allow you to chose specific countries' public holidays, like UK, US, China, etc. When you say "customize"? Is that like you want to remove for example Christmas but still have Easter in the calendar? I'm not aware of any that can do that.

 

[Hadron]

If you want to customise holidays, add them manually to your own calendar.

If you subscribe to an external calendar then you will see all events in it, and holidays are no exception. You could copy the ones you want from a "holiday calendar" and then unsubscribe from that, though that won't be perfect because some holidays aren't at the same time each year (e.g. Easter).

 

[loader]

Most device's stock calendar apps allow you to chose specific countries' public holidays, like UK, US, China, etc. When you say "customize"? Is that like you want to remove for example Christmas but still have Easter in the calendar? I'm not aware of any that can do that.

It's actually a mix of holidays and observance days/weeks/months. Among others, I don't need "First Day of LGBTQ+ Pride Month" on my calendar.

 

[loader]

If you want to customise holidays, add them manually to your own calendar.

If you subscribe to an external calendar then you will see all events in it, and holidays are no exception. You could copy the ones you want from a "holiday calendar" and then unsubscribe from that, though that won't be perfect because some holidays aren't at the same time each year (e.g. Easter).

Unfortunately I think this is about the only idea that would work, from what I can see. It would just make too much sense and allow you too much control to allow you to delete a single event from your calendar, whether that be a holiday or day of observance.

 

[Clementine_3]

When i was working the company would send a calendar for us to import, it had paydays and holidays/days off, that was it, no oddball special days. It was great. I didn't realize until after I was forced to retire that finding just a basic holiday calendar was impossible. I don't need holiday observed days or arbor day, I just want the actual (major) holiday day or at least the ability to delete what i don't want. Nope. No can do. I had to update my calendar manually and remember to fix Easter each year - in this day and age! - go figure.

 

[Hadron]

I think the problem is that it's not in your calendar: it's an event in an external shared calendar that you are choosing to display or subscribe to. So deleting it from the calendar itself isn't an option, and even if they provided a way of deleting the copy of an individual event from your local calendar database it would be a waste of time because it would just reappear the next time the phone synched (I have one ancient app that lets me set reminders for external events, but this is what happens: you set them, save them, then a few minutes later your changes have gone).

Of course you can imagine solutions - it's software after all. Probably the simplest would be for your calendar app to have the option to hide individual events. However it can't do that by adding a flag to the event itself, because the calendar app doesn't own the calendar database (which is available to any calendar app, and based on standards for calendar sharing and syncing which don't include such a flag). And then there's the problem of any change you make being overwritten when it syncs. So the calendar app would need to keep a parallel database of which appointments it should mask out, and my guess is that no app developer has felt it worth the amount of effort required. Even then I could imagine that if the event is updated in the source of the calendar the association to the "hide this event" flag could be lost, meaning that the event would reappear.

(The question is relevant to me today because my calendar is telling me there's a costume party in London for a guy I don't know starting a job he's actually been doing since last September, which is a textbook example of calendar clutter ).

 

[loader]

I think the problem is that it's not in your calendar

That is truly the heart of the matter. People/Corporations want to control, manipulate and add a fee to every aspect of your life. I don't need a calendar to sync with anything other than the calendars on my devices. Holidays, etc are set. Provide a calendar for the next 50 years with those events and if anything needs to be added or removed I will do it.

 

[Hadron]

There are actually a few reasons why holiday calendars are done by syncing from an external source rather than being pre-programmed into the phone, and they don't (for once!) involve corporate control:

1) It requires literally no work on the manufacturer's part, since the ability to sync external calendars is a feature they have to provide anyway. Just leave the user to choose whatever holiday calendar they want. Whereas pre-programming 50 years of holidays requires that the manufacturer collects and maintains lists for every country they sell phones in and pre-loads the appropriate one for each phone (depending on what country it is being shipped to), and probably a few other tasks that I've overlooked.

2) If you pre-program the calendar it doesn't change, but the events might, e.g. extra national holidays may be declared. If the holiday calendar is provided by some external source they can update that and the sync mechanism will deal with it.

3) What happens if you factory reset the phone? If they pre-load the calendar into the /data partition it will be erased completely if you ever have to do a reset (since it is not synced). If instead they load it into /system you won't be able to edit it at all. So instead they'd have to keep a copy of the data in /system and then copy it into the system calendar database (as a local unsynced calendar) every time a new account is added.

Overall this is a lot of effort for the manufacturer to go to for one particular use case (holiday calendar). IMO it would be far better to address the limitations of shared calendars generally rather than to make a bespoke solution for one individual example (and probably less work, as it would be a one-off job rather than an ongoing one).

 

[Clementine_3]

(The question is relevant to me today because my calendar is telling me there's a costume party in London for a guy I don't know starting a job he's actually been doing since last September, which is a textbook example of calendar clutter ).

 

[mikedt]

It's actually a mix of holidays and observance days/weeks/months. Among others, I don't need "First Day of LGBTQ+ Pride Month" on my calendar.

Really?? What calendar app is that, and what data source is it using? I certainly don't need anything like that either, and never likely to see it.

I use the Samsung and Huawei calendar apps, set to show public holidays for UK, China, and USA. and those show real public holidays and observances like Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year. Proclamation of the People's Republic of China, Dragon Boat Festival, etc.

 

[loader]

Really?? What calendar app is that, and what data source is it using? I certainly don't need anything like that either, and never likely to see it.

I use the Samsung and Huawei calendar apps, set to show public holidays for UK, China, and USA. and those show real public holidays and observances like Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year. Proclamation of the People's Republic of China, Dragon Boat Festival, etc.

I think it's pulling it from Google Calendar. I have a few different emails apparently that I've set up over the years and linked them to calendars. I don't know it's kind of a mess.

I guess I should have said I'm asking all of this because my new Samsung S23 Ultra will arrive in a few days so I'll be starting with a brand new phone here shortly. I've never used a Samsung phone before and I'm unfamiliar with the Samsung calendar so hopefully it'll be useful straight out of the box.

 

[loader]

Something I would like to find though and add to my calendar is a list of all the geek days basically and what I mean by that is calculator day, Pi Day and we just had May 4th which was Star Wars Day May the 4th be with you. There's a lot of them. Anything interesting would be nice too like I'm sure that there's probably like a Corvette day of the year or any trivial kind of days like that.

 

[mikedt]

I think it's pulling it from Google Calendar. I have a few different emails apparently that I've set up over the years and linked them to calendars. I don't know it's kind of a mess.

Note to myself @mikedt : Do NOT use Google Calendar.

I guess I should have said I'm asking all of this because my new Samsung S23 Ultra will arrive in a few days so I'll be starting with a brand new phone here shortly. I've never used a Samsung phone before and I'm unfamiliar with the Samsung calendar so hopefully it'll be useful straight out of the box.

I've been using a Samsung phone and the stock calendar app for a couple of years now, however it's a Chinese version phone and I'm in China, so it's very unlikely to push things like "First Day of LGBTQ+ Pride Month" into my calendars. Not unless I synced it with some third-party source.

 

[svim]

You don't actually need to make this into such a major problem for yourself. You have the option to manage your own personal calendar and there is no reason to include other, externally-sourced calendars when you find their content unnecessary. Stop trying to force something to work that isn't doable, you're just frustrating yourself for no practical reason. (To do what you keep trying to do requires you to become a skilled programmer/developer, and for you to root your phone. Then you need to peruse through the appropriate cal directory buried within the system file structure and edit just the specific .ical/.ics file in question.)
Instead, just go into your Calendar app's Settings menu and disable all the other calendars you don't want leaving just your own. Now edit which holidays and events you want shown, and set each one up to automatically show up yearly (... or monthly or whatever). You also have the ability to set up how often their Notifications get shown.