Expose Calendar in Android

[skylord123]

Describe the feature

I would like for the calendars to be exposed to Android. Similar to how outlook and Google calendars are. This way the events can show up on my Pebble smart watch and be viewed with the calendar app in Android.

Use cases

My wife and me have given up on cloud calendars and have gone full in on HA calendars. We put all sort of stuff in there (doctor appointments, birthdays, etc). Would be nice to have these exposed to Android so I can have other apps use them. Namely my Pebble smart watch. I get all my work calendar stuff on the watch because I use outlook but HA does not expose these so I cannot get them to show up in my watch timeline.

Examples

No response

Anything else?

No response

[mik-laj]

Thanks for sharing the idea - the use case really does make sense. Having all your Home Assistant calendars show up directly in Android or on a smartwatch would definitely be convenient, especially if you’ve moved everything into HA.

That said, exposing HA calendars directly through Android’s Calendar Provider is a pretty big leap. Home Assistant was designed to read calendars from external services (Google, Outlook, etc.) and use them for automations - not to act as a full calendar provider for other apps.
Once the HA app needs to sync events into Android’s system calendar, handle updates, permissions, conflicts, and multiple linked calendars, it starts drifting into the territory of a full calendar-sync service. That’s a lot of complexity and not really where the app is headed today.

I’ve also run into similar conversations before - people often expect the HA Calendar to behave like full-featured calendar apps with search, filtering, and cross-device sync. And while it’s tempting, HA’s calendars aren’t really meant to replace platforms like Google Calendar or Outlook.

If you’re specifically looking for a self-hosted solution that keeps everything local and private, you might want to take a look at Nextcloud Calendar. It’s basically a full-featured calendar platform you can run on your own server - with search, recurring events, color-coding, sharing, mobile sync, and CalDAV support. Since Home Assistant already integrates with CalDAV, you can keep all your events stored locally in Nextcloud while still letting HA read them for automations. This setup tends to be much more reliable than trying to turn HA itself into a calendar provider for Android, and it works nicely with smartwatches and other apps through standard Android calendar sync.

If the goal is to make HA calendar data available to other apps, something like ICS export might be a more realistic long-term direction. That would let Android apps or smartwatches subscribe to the events without the HA app becoming a system-level calendar provider.

So the idea definitely has appeal, but the implementation would pull HA quite far outside its current role. Still, thanks for bringing it up - it’s always helpful to understand how people are using HA in their daily workflows!

[cvroque]

I believe this one is worth discussing, my family is in a similar situation since having everything on HA is great for privacy and is also very convenient for our needs.

For now, I use automations to send app notifications about calendar events which is okay and I understand there is a huge amount of work to turn HA into a calendar platform.

I also don't mind using another solution to host my calendar, but then I'll lose the ability to edit events from within HA and that is my dealbreaker.

In short: I want to be able to create, delete and edit calendar events in HA and it would be great to also have these calendars available on phones native calendar apps.

[mik-laj]

I created a PR to update our documentation to explain use case of local calendar: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/41839/files I think this will clear up any doubts when someone wants to use HA as a personal calendar again.

[skylord123]

If you want everything to stay local and self-hosted, platforms like Nextcloud Calendar support full CalDAV sync with phones and also allow Home Assistant to manage events. This way you keep privacy, get native calendar apps on your phone, and still edit everything from within HA - without turning HA into a full calendar service.

I do have Nextcloud and will look into this but I still would like to see a solution with Home Assistant doing this natively without the need for another tool. I already have about 5 different calendars setup in HA (with events going back months) and so migrating those to Nextcloud is going to be a pain.

I personally would love to see Home Assistant local calendars become more of a replacement for the other solutions. Especially for people that do not run Nextcloud but still want full local calendars.

[mik-laj]

I already have about 5 different calendars setup in HA (with events going back months) and so migrating those to Nextcloud is going to be a pain.

Migrating them is usually straightforward, because you can export each calendar to an iCal file and import it directly into platforms like Nextcloud. Home Assistant exposes the same calendar API regardless of the backend, so after import you only need to update your automations to use the new entities or swap entities IDs

I personally would love to see Home Assistant local calendars become more of a replacement for the other solutions. Especially for people that do not run Nextcloud but still want full local calendars.

I understand the appeal. Full-featured local calendars would certainly be convenient, but the current Home Assistant Local Calendar was intentionally built as an automation-focused tool rather than a general-purpose calendar system. Developing a complete calendar platform would require significant scope expansion in areas like mobile syncing, conflict handling, searching, recurrence rules, and mobile integrations and probably many more

That said, Home Assistant grows in the directions the community pushes it, and nothing prevents future improvements if contributors are interested. For now, the best experience comes from combining Home Assistant with existing calendar platforms. Integrations are one of HA’s biggest strengths: HA acts as the hub that connects and automates rather than replacing every external service.

Especially for people that do not run Nextcloud but still want full local calendars.

It’s worth mentioning that a dedicated calendar service doesn’t have to be a separate, complex setup. A CalDAV server can be run as a Home Assistant add-on, so it remains local, self-hosted and integrated, without requiring a full external deployment. In practice, this often provides a much better user experience, especially if you want your calendars to act as an Android Calendar Provider. Home Assistant does not currently fulfill that role, while a proper calendar backend is built for exactly this purpose.

[mik-laj]

Since you already run both Home Assistant and Nextcloud, I’m curious how you see the split between them. If you were setting up those 5 calendars today, would you still choose to create them inside Home Assistant, or would you consider placing them in Nextcloud instead? What criteria would guide that decision for you?

Understanding your reasoning might help clarify where the Local Calendar is genuinely useful, and where a dedicated calendar backend provides a better long-term experience.

[skylord123]

@mik-laj honestly I don't even use the calendar feature in Nextcloud. I only use Nextcloud for backing up my devices to my home server and sharing files.

I just spent last couple hours trying to get nextcloud added in Home Assistant to no avail. First it was a networking issue between HA being in bridge mode and my nextcloud instance being in a vlan. Got that resolved by adding both containers to the same network (can curl and ping it from the HA container now) but whenever I try to connect I just get a "Failed to connect" in HA while trying to set it up. I confirmed my account is an admin, monitoring plugin is installed, and I generated an app password. None of that worked. Checking log gives me:

Logger: py.warnings
Source: components/nextcloud/config_flow.py:44
First occurred: 11:26:53 PM (12 occurrences)
Last logged: 11:34:58 PM

/usr/local/lib/python3.13/site-packages/urllib3/connectionpool.py:1097: InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made to host 'nextcloud'. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised. See: https://urllib3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced-usage.html#tls-warnings warnings.warn(

Looks like the checkbox for verify SSL host does nothing as I have that unchecked.

Understanding your reasoning might help clarify where the Local Calendar is genuinely useful, and where a dedicated calendar backend provides a better long-term experience.

Dealing with all this extra overhead is my primary issue. It's yet another thing I have to setup correctly and manage whereas if the HA app did this I wouldn't have to deal with any of this. Also my wife and me both have calendars in Home Assistant and it looks like her Nextcloud account will now need to be an admin as well to be added to HA which sort of sucks (love my wife but she isn't the most tech savvy and if her account is compromised..). It also requires you to have the Nextcloud app as well as DAVx so two additional apps on both our phones to make this work.

Later I will try resolving my issue. I need to move Home Assistant container to my vlan that my web server resides on so it can reach the Nextcloud instance with a proper SSL cert (and also possibly create a new issue for the Nextcloud integration stating that the unchecked verify SSL cert checkbox does not work). That is going to be a bit of work though as many of my devices are hard coded to the IP HA is currently on. So this has become quite the problem child to setup for me.

This whole process could be made sooo much simpler and more widely available if it was built into HA companion app. I wouldn't have to deal with any of this and it would just work.

I am grateful there is a solution and thank you for bringing this up. It's definitely worth setting up in my case I just would personally love to just have HA cover this role. I understand that is quite the undertaking and may not happen but I definitely hope so.