You asked for it: reading your phone calendar

You asked for it: a series about what changed in XNeuronal because a user reported it or suggested it.

Yes, XNeuronal now reads your phone's calendar. In Settings › Phone calendar, you pick the calendars to read: their appointments become cards that the morning briefing and the question “what have I got this week?” both know about. The other way round, an appointment you dictate is written into the calendars you chose. It ships in version 1.0.11.

One morning, “no appointments”

In early September, a user of android-hilfe, a German forum about Android, sent us a private message. He had noticed something simple and awkward: the morning briefing told him his day had no appointments, while his Android calendar clearly had some.

Picture the scene and you see what is misleading about it. You get up, you listen to the day's summary while the coffee brews, you hear that nothing is planned, and you arrange your morning around that. The appointment is still there, in the calendar app you did not open, because you had just asked someone else.

He did not stop at pointing it out. He suggested the obvious next step: an appointment dictated to XNeuronal should land in that calendar too, so that both would finally say the same thing.

Two diaries that ignored each other

The briefing was not really lying. It faithfully summed up what XNeuronal knew, and XNeuronal only knew what it had been told. Yet a good share of a week's appointments never arrive by voice: an invitation received at work, a slot booked online that adds itself to the calendar, a shared family calendar where someone else notes the children's dentist.

All of those lived in the phone's calendar, on the same device as XNeuronal, and stayed invisible to it. So there were two diaries side by side, each complete in its own way and wrong about the whole. The only link between them was the person, who had to remember to check both. That is exactly the kind of load that reminders and a calendar that remember for you are meant to lift.

The request was spot on, and it was treated that way. Reading the phone calendar and writing to it arrived on 3 September, were completed on the 8th, and ship in version 1.0.11, released on the Play Store on 10 September.

Reading the phone's calendar, not the servers

The first decision, and the one that shapes everything else: XNeuronal does not sign in to any account. It fetches nothing from Google, Microsoft or Samsung. It reads the phone's calendar, the shared place where Google Calendar, Outlook with its sync turned on, Samsung Calendar and many others already store their appointments.

That choice has two consequences we wanted. There is no password to hand over and no account to link. And any calendar that syncs to the phone becomes readable, without a separate connector for each provider.

When a calendar does not show up in the list, it usually means it does not sync to the phone yet. The help page on calendars explains what to do for Outlook, Proton, iCloud, or a mail account such as one hosted by OVH.

The setting itself lives in Settings › Phone calendar: you pick the calendars to read. As long as you pick none, nothing is read.

Ordinary cards

The second decision: an imported appointment becomes a card like any other. Not a separate category, not a special view you would have to remember to open. The copy is made directly, without going through the AI: the title, the times, the place and the description are taken as they are, nothing is reinterpreted.

That is what fixes the original problem. The morning briefing now counts these appointments along with the rest, and when you ask “what have I got this week?”, the answer includes them without you having to say where they came from.

In the app's calendar view, each imported appointment takes the colour of its calendar, and a filter lets you choose which sources are shown. In the memory constellation, each imported calendar appears as a point, linked to the appointments that came from it. Birthdays get their own mark in the calendar, a pink badge with a cake, plus the person's age when their year of birth is known.

Two fixes on 8 September made these cards dependable day to day. A repeating appointment, a birthday for instance, lands on its next occurrence rather than on the first date of the series. The duplicates Google sometimes keeps in the phone's calendar are imported only once. And an “all-day” event lands on the right day and rings that same day, at the morning briefing time (8 a.m. by default), instead of at midnight.

Who is right about an appointment

An appointment that exists in two places raises the question sooner or later: if you move it, which copy wins? The answer fits in one sentence. An appointment that came from the calendar is changed in its original calendar. If you ask XNeuronal to move it, the assistant tells you so, and the card follows at the next sync. You can still mark it done, add a reminder to it or link it to a person: things a calendar cannot hold.

The other way round, an appointment created with XNeuronal belongs to XNeuronal. You change it by talking to it, as always.

And the other way

The second half of the suggestion was taken at its word. On the same screen, you choose which calendars XNeuronal writes the appointments you dictate into. You can pick several: the same appointment is then copied into each one, for instance so you also find it in the calendar you check from your computer. “I've got the dentist on Thursday at 2 pm”, said once to the phone, shows up in the calendar you open at the office.

Unticking deletes nothing

The third decision: turning off a calendar stops the sync, and that is all. Cards already imported stay in the memory. A setting you change, sometimes without thinking, should not wipe out months of appointments. If you really want them gone, Settings › Memory › Erase removes them, calendar by calendar.

One last detail matters to anyone who shares cards. A calendar's name is often an email address. It never appears in a card shared with someone close to you.

What it changes for everyone

For the person who raised it, mornings are accurate again: the briefing talks about the real day. For everyone else, the consequence is wider. You no longer have to choose between the calendar you have used for years and a memory that keeps the rest. The calendar still says when. XNeuronal keeps what surrounds it: what to bring, what was said last time, the person you are going to see. And the two talk to each other, both ways, with no account to link and nothing to type twice.

Thank you

This change exists because a user of android-hilfe took the time to report a briefing that got things wrong, and to suggest something better. Thank you to him. Feedback like this is what moves XNeuronal forward, and telling those stories is what this series is for.