Google Calendar is still Android’s best tablet app

Abner Li | May 21 2024 - 4:50 pm PT

As I said in 2022, Google Calendar is my favorite first-party app for Android tablets and foldables. Following an update detailed at I/O 2024, it retains that top spot for me.

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When viewing the Schedule, Day, or Week view in Google Calendar, you’ll notice a drag handle at the left edge of your screen. If you hold and swipe right, it will show a monthly calendar. It’s narrow by default, but you can expand that view to take up most of the screen. While this is happening, you see more and more of the whimsical background illustration. This adjustability also applies to viewing event details.

This ability to “easily assign more screen space for a specific layout or even quickly switch to a single layout temporarily” is called “pane expansion. Being able to quickly see the full month without leaving the day/week view is quite handy when planning. In the past, I might have needed to pull up a second device if I didn’t want to lose my place in the tablet app, or move to desktop where there is a persistent month widget on calendar.google.com.

It makes the Google Calendar UI feel unique, with your width preference for that left-hand pane preserved through different screens, in a way that mobile apps usually aren’t. Dynamic Color would be the other major example.

The Material 3 guidelines show pane expansion in an email client. It would be a great update for Gmail, with a fullscreen experience today only possible by rotating from landscape to portrait orientation.

More broadly, all dual-column apps will hopefully adopt pane expansion going forward: “This feature will be supported by activity embedding in Android 15, and is also planned to be supported by the material3-adaptive library.” Developer guidance is available here.

My adoration for Google Calendar comes down to how it does not have a typical tab/feed-based layout. The tablet app really takes advantage of the available screen real estate to show more content without being overwhelming, while the functionality pane expansion makes possible approaches desktop-level utility.

It all fits into a talk Google gave last I/O previewing a personal future for Material You tablet apps. In 2023, Google talked about building more “Personal” UIs and pane expansion allows for that level of customization. The other tentpoles Google discussed were “Expressive” and “Spirited.”