Maple is shutting down on 31 December 2026 — where to move your family calendar
Maple will sunset on 31 December 2026. Your data stays reachable until that date and is deleted afterwards with no way to recover it, so the two things worth doing now are exporting what you want to keep and deciding where the family's week lives next (Maple).
Maple has been acquired by Wander. Annual subscriptions stop renewing and monthly ones run to the shutdown date; accounts close on 31 December.
Do the export first
Export before you compare anything. A shutdown date is a hard one, and an export you already hold makes every later decision reversible.
Take out, at least:
- The calendar. Anything that is not already in Google, Outlook or iCloud exists only inside Maple.
- Lists and notes attached to the family's routine, which rarely survive a move unless they are copied by hand.
- Anything with a photo or a file on it, which exports and imports worst of all.
Maple's own advice is to export or transfer to another app before the shutdown, so do that while the account is still open rather than in the last week of December.
What to check in a replacement
The shutdown is a chance to fix the thing that made a shared family app necessary in the first place. Four questions sort the options quickly:
- Does it hold your calendar, or read the ones you already have? An app that keeps its own calendar means everyone has to enter things twice, or remember to. An app that connects to Google, Outlook or iCloud leaves the calendars where they are.
- Does it write back? A read-only import shows the family what is on, but an event added there never reaches your own calendar.
- What do the others see? A work calendar shared in full tells the household who your 2 pm is with. The useful setting is one that shows the time as busy and nothing else.
- Can children be in it without an account? Children under about 13 have no email address to invite, and a family week without them is not the family's week.
Where the usual options land
Google Calendar and iCloud both share properly only with people on the same service: a private iCloud share needs the other person to have an Apple Account and use iCloud. Across the two, the built-in route is publishing a calendar to a public link and subscribing to it, which gives a read-only copy on the other side.
Apps that keep their own shared calendar — the category Maple was in — answer question 1 by asking everybody to move in. That works when everyone does.
How moving to Alfie works
Alfie is our product, and it is the second kind: it does not ask anyone to move.
Each adult connects the account 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. All of them sync both ways: an event created in Alfie on a connected calendar is written to that calendar, so it appears in that person's own calendar app. Public ICS links, such as a school term calendar, are read-only. Google reviewed and approved Alfie's access to Google Calendar in September 2026.
Sharing is set once per calendar for the whole household — Full details, Busy only or Hidden — and a calendar marked as a work calendar starts at busy only. Children are added as profiles: a name, their own calendar, managed by a parent, with no account, email address or password.
There is no importer for a Maple export, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. In practice a move looks like this: connect each adult's calendar, add the children as profiles, then copy across the handful of recurring things that lived only in Maple — the swimming lesson, the term dates, the Thursday pick-up. Most of a family's week is already in somebody's calendar; what needs retyping is what the old app was holding on its own.
You can then ask the assistant what is on tomorrow, when everyone is free, or who is collecting on Thursday, and it answers from the household's week.
To start, create a household, connect one account each, and invite the rest with a link. It takes about ten minutes, and Alfie is free to use — worth doing before December rather than in it.