this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Why do so many email apps add calendars? (lazysoci.al)
submitted 1 week ago by sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to c/askandroid@lemdro.id
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

As the title asks, why do so many email apps go on to add calendars? What's wrong with keeping them as separate apps?

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[–] Bravebellows@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Calendar invites mostly come via email so it's easier to schedule from inside the email client, for my experience

[–] Obelix@feddit.org 9 points 1 week ago

This is the answer. Mail & Calendar together in one app go back into the days before we had multitasking OS. So it does make sense to include both functionalities into one application, because you couldn't easily switch to your calendar "app" like you can today or even share the appointment easily. And since this is going back for decades, this is also baked into users workflows. So if you don't have a calendar, many users will not use your mail software. Calendars are quick & easy to implement and don't need much maintenance, so there is little reason to not integrate them

[–] Gloria@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think this is mostly by the creation of WebDAV

WebDAV began in 1996 when Jim Whitehead worked with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to host two meetings to discuss the problem of distributed authoring on the World Wide Web with interested people.[4][5] Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web involved a medium for both reading and writing. In fact, Berners-Lee's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, could both view and edit web pages; [...] The WebDAV working group concluded its work in March 2007, after the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) accepted an incremental update to RFC 2518

and the further devlopment of CalDAV

The CalDAV specification was first published in 2003 as an Internet Draft submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) by Lisa Dusseault. In March 2007, the CalDAV specification was finished and published by the IETF as RFC 4791, authored by Cyrus Daboo (Apple), Bernard Desruissaux (Oracle), and Lisa Dusseault (CommerceNet). CalDAV is designed for implementation by any collaborative software, client or server, that needs to maintain, access or share collections of events. It is developed as an open standard to foster interoperability between software from different vendors.

Since then email and calendar are closely related in protocol and handling. You send invitations via email and the same service is able to handle and hold(!) reseverations/events. Software-wise It comes for free, but many developers had to suffer great pain to implement or debug *DAV (until this day).

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 week ago

Also dont forget CardDAV for contacts

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

Agree. I prefer a dedicated calendar to the embedded versions in email clients.

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago

Vivaldi enters the room

(No shit they have a mail app, calendar, notes, webapps and more that I forgot)