RealCal support

Choose your calendars under Settings → Sources & Priorities and put them in priority order. Tap events in the planner to select or deselect them, then confirm with the checkmark. Your plan is saved locally. Tap the pencil to edit a saved plan. Undo is available immediately after planning.

The initial selection uses your source calendar order and event rules. Always Prefer can give an event precedence over a higher-priority calendar; Never Select Automatically leaves it out of the initial selection. You can change the selection before saving.

Turn on Autoplan in Settings. It plans seven days including today and updates automatically planned days when checked again. Days you planned yourself stay protected. If you edit an Autoplan day yourself, it becomes your manual plan. The system controls background checks, which are not guaranteed to happen immediately.

Touch and hold an event while planning. Choose Never Select Automatically, Always Prefer or Hide. For recurring events, the rule applies to the whole series. Remove rules under Settings → Rules to restore the normal selection or show hidden events again.

Use the button next to Settings to switch between a list and a timeline. Under Display, choose Compact or Full Day and set your Week Start. There you can also choose whether hatched left-out events appear nowhere, in the app, or in both the app and widget.

Export is not required to use RealCal. Under Settings → Calendar Export, turn on Export to Calendar and choose a writable destination calendar. RealCal still saves your plan locally and also writes copies to that calendar. Your calendar provider may sync those copies. Export is off for new users.

Under Settings → Calendar Export, check that export is on and a writable destination calendar is selected. RealCal needs calendar access. Only events in your plan are exported. If RealCal reports an export error, your local plan is still saved. If copies are missing on another device, also check your calendar provider’s sync settings.

First check that the calendar is available in the Calendar app on your iPhone or iPad. In system Settings, allow RealCal full access under Privacy & Security → Calendars. Then return to RealCal and select it under Settings → Sources & Priorities. Exact system labels may vary by version.

Touch and hold the Home Screen and open the option to add widgets. Choose RealCal. Touch and hold the added widget and choose Edit Widget to change its range. Larger widgets offer a list or timeline. Lock Screen widgets and available sizes depend on your device and system version.

A Live Activity shows upcoming events from today’s plan on supported devices. Turn it on or off in RealCal. Say “Show my plan in RealCal” or use the Shortcuts app. The Plan Day control in Control Center opens the planner. Not every feature is available on every device and system version.

Under Settings → Notifications, set up the daily Planning reminder and alerts for Changes to planned days. Also allow notifications for RealCal in system Settings. The planning reminder reminds you to plan, not to attend each event. The system decides when changes are detected in the background; immediate alerts are not guaranteed.

Under Settings → Planning → Buffers & Travel, flag tight changes of place and set a minimum gap for preselection and Autoplan. Travel times are optional and start off. When enabled, Apple Maps calculates travel between neighbouring events with known places. Online events and events without a place get no travel. Change the travel mode for each trip or leave it out; optionally include travel from and to home. Places and route details are sent to Apple without location permission. Not every route is available.

Repeated changes to preselection can lead to suggested rules in your plan and under Rules. You decide whether to accept them. Under Settings → Planning → Autoplan → Improve Autoplan, review the last and next two weeks for findings such as cancelled or duplicate events and recurring overlaps. Your answers become rules only when you apply them. On Autoplan days, RealCal also explains why events were left out.

No. Planning, learned rule suggestions and rule-based checks work without Apple Intelligence. When an Apple model is available, it can classify recurring entries and summarize the results in Improve Autoplan. The on-device model is the default. Only when available, you can choose Private Cloud Compute in Autoplan settings; the calendar details used for those requests are then sent to Apple for processing.

Turn on Settings → iCloud Sync on the devices you want to use, signed in with the same iCloud account. Plans, rules, preferences and syncable settings are then also stored in your private CloudKit database. You don’t need a RealCal account. If changes conflict, RealCal may ask which data you want to keep. If sync fails, check the status in those settings, your iCloud sign-in and internet connection. Your calendar provider still syncs source calendars; a plan received through iCloud is not automatically exported to a calendar again.