Howbout: shared calendar

Review by eFreeware

Coordinating anything with more than two people usually turns into the same tired routine: a message thread where nobody can remember who is free, a date that gets suggested and quietly dropped, and a plan that never quite becomes real. The gap is rarely willingness. It is visibility. Nobody can see everyone else's week, so every suggestion costs another round of messages.

Howbout is built around that gap. It is a shared calendar, listed under Social rather than productivity, and it has been on Google Play since November 2019. The pitch is simple enough to state in one line: put your schedules together, see where the gaps are, and turn a gap into a plan.

Friends, couples and families first

The developer organizes the app around three settings, and they are genuinely different problems. Friend groups need to find an evening that works for six people with six calendars. Couples need to stop double-booking dinners, trips and family visits. Families need one place where school runs, appointments and weekend plans are visible to everyone involved.

That framing tells you a fair amount about who will get value from it. If you are the person in your circle who ends up organizing things, the appeal is obvious: availability is shared rather than requested, so the initial round of questions disappears. If you plan mostly alone and only occasionally join group events, a shared calendar has less to offer you, because its usefulness grows with the number of people in the group.

It is also worth noting the app is rated for Everyone and sits in the Social category, which fits a tool that is as much about a group's shared life as about time management. This is not a work scheduler dressed up for consumers; the examples the developer gives are dinners, dates and family logistics.

One calendar, several schedules

The core of the app is a joint calendar. Groups plan and schedule their events together inside one shared calendar. Rather than asking each person for their availability, the calendar itself becomes the shared reference point, which is the part that removes the back-and-forth the app is designed to eliminate.

Howbout also connects to the calendars people already keep. Google Calendar, Outlook and iCloud can be linked so existing commitments appear alongside the shared plans and clashes become visible before a date is agreed. That matters more than it sounds: a group calendar only works if it reflects real life, and most people already have a work or personal calendar they are not going to abandon.

Availability sharing is the second half of the idea. Instead of a private calendar that others cannot read, group members can see when each other are free, which is what makes a plan possible in one pass rather than five. The developer describes this as seeing when friends are free at a glance, and the whole design leans on that visibility.

Polls, chat and the social layer

Once a group has decided to do something, the practical question is when. Howbout handles that with event planning and polls, where members vote on proposed times rather than negotiating in a thread. For groups that struggle to converge, a poll is a small but effective piece of structure: options are laid out, votes are counted, and the decision stops being a conversation.

Every plan also carries its own group chat. Keeping discussion attached to the event rather than scattered across messaging apps means the details, the time and the people are in one place. Whether that replaces your usual chat depends on how your group already talks, but for the logistics of a specific plan it keeps things tidy.

There is a social feed as well, showing friends' plans and updates. This is the piece that makes Howbout feel closer to a social app than a calendar utility, and it is the feature most likely to divide people: some will enjoy seeing what their circle is up to, while others will treat it as noise around the scheduling they came for. Custom colors and categories, plus home screen widgets, cover the personalization and the at-a-glance view of what is coming up.

What it costs

The app does offer in-app purchases, so if cost matters to you, check what is on offer inside the app before committing to it as your group's main planning tool.

The install base is substantial: over a million downloads on Google Play and a 4.5 average from more than 20,000 ratings. Those numbers say the app has found a real audience, though a rating tells you how people felt about the app overall rather than whether your particular group will adopt it.

What else could do this job

The most obvious alternative is the calendar you already have. Google Calendar, Outlook and iCloud all support sharing, and Howbout connects to them rather than replacing them, so the question is whether you need a layer on top. A shared calendar in a standard calendar app can work if your group is small and disciplined about keeping it updated.

The other alternative is the group chat you already use. For a one-off plan, a message thread is faster than setting up a calendar, and no app will change that. The case for Howbout is repetition: the same group, planning often, with the same friction every time.

There are also dedicated event and invitation services, which tend to be stronger for a single occasion with a guest list and weaker for the ongoing visibility of who is free when. Howbout sits closer to the calendar end of that range. The distinction matters because the app's value is cumulative. A tool built for repeated group planning rewards a group that actually uses it consistently.

A shared calendar for the friend who organizes everything

Howbout addresses a real and familiar problem, and it does so with a sensible set of pieces: a joint calendar, syncing with the calendars people already keep, availability sharing, polls for agreeing on times, chat attached to each plan, and widgets for a quick look at what is coming. It is free, and has been updated recently with faster launching, an in-app language setting and bug fixes.

The app is at its best for a defined circle that plans together regularly, whether that is a friend group, a couple or a family. It is the organizer in that circle who will feel the difference first, because the app removes the questions they normally have to ask. Anyone planning solo, or joining group events only now and then, will find less here to justify the setup.

If your group already coordinates well through a shared calendar or a busy chat, the gain is smaller. If your plans keep stalling at the same stage, this is a reasonable place to start, and the free download makes trying it with one group a low-risk decision.

What's new in version 16.5.3

We’ve been working on some serious under-the-bonnet speed boosts to make your app launch faster than ever. No more waiting around to see what plans you’ve got coming up! 🏎️ You can now also change your app language directly in your app settings. And we’ve swept away some pesky bugs to keep everything running smoothly ✨