A family calendar when some of you use Google and some use iCloud
Google Calendar and iCloud both share calendars properly only with people on the same service: a private iCloud share needs the other person to have an Apple Account and use iCloud, and a Google share opens in the other person's Google Calendar. Across the two, the only built-in route is to make a calendar public and subscribe to that link, which gives a read-only copy.
That is the whole problem in two sentences, and most mixed households discover it halfway through setting things up. Here is what each route actually gives you.
Sharing inside one service
On iCloud, open icloud.com/calendar, select the information button next to a calendar, and add an email address under Sharing With, with either Allow editing or Read-Only. Apple is explicit about the requirement: your invitees must have an Apple Account and use iCloud in order to use the calendar (Apple Support).
On Google, open a calendar's Settings and sharing and add people under Share with specific people or groups, choosing anything from See only free/busy (hide details) to Make changes and manage sharing (Google Calendar Help). The person opens it in their own Google Calendar.
Both work well, and neither crosses over.
The public link route
Each service can also publish a calendar to a link that anyone can subscribe to.
On iCloud, turn on Public Calendar and send the link. People who subscribe can view the calendar but cannot change it, and they do not need an iCloud account. In Google Calendar, the other parent adds it with Add other calendars to the left of "Other calendars", then From URL — which works only if the calendar is public (Google Calendar Help).
Three things come with this route:
- It is one-way and read-only. Whoever subscribes cannot add the dentist appointment they just booked; they have to tell the calendar's owner to add it.
- Refresh is not immediate, and not documented. Google's help page does not say how often it re-reads a subscribed URL, so an event added on one side can sit unseen on the other for a while.
- "Public" means public. The link is not a secret share with your partner: anyone who has it can subscribe, and there is no way to take it back short of turning the link off and issuing a new one.
For a school term calendar, that is fine. For the calendar your household runs on, being a day behind and read-only is the wrong shape.
What most families end up doing
The common fallback is a third shared calendar that everyone writes into — a Google calendar shared with the iCloud parent's Google account, or a family group calendar — used only for family events. It works, at the price of every person keeping two calendars: their own, and the family one. The events that cause the most trouble are exactly the ones people forget to copy across: a late meeting, a school pick-up, a trip.
The other fallback is everybody moving to one service, which usually means the parent whose work runs on Microsoft 365, or whose phone puts everything in iCloud, doing the moving.
How to do it with Alfie
Alfie is our product, and it is built for this case. Nobody has to move service or publish anything: each person connects the accounts they already use — Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, iCloud through an app-specific password, or any CalDAV server — and the household gets one week made of those calendars. Events created in Alfie on a connected calendar are written back to it, so both parents can add to the same week from the app they prefer. Google reviewed and approved Alfie's access to Google Calendar in September 2026.
How much of each calendar the household sees is set once per calendar — Full details, Busy only or Hidden — so a work calendar can show as busy blocks while the family calendar shows everything. Children are added as profiles with their own calendar and no account of their own, which is the other thing neither Google's nor Apple's sharing can do.
You can also ask the assistant when everyone is free, or when a child's swimming lesson is, and get an answer from the whole household's week rather than one service's slice of it.
To set it up, create a household, connect one account each, and invite the others with a link. It takes about ten minutes, and Alfie is free to use.