My calendar on my phone routinely forgets to remind me, even though clearly the entry says "remind me 1 hour before" and other events with the same reminders work fine.
Are there any good calendar hosting companies where I could pay a few $$ a month for decent features, bug fixes, and service?
My company pays quite a bit for Google services (including calendar), and I personally have had this problem bite me for meetings which don't show up in the feed until well after they've occurred.
Unfortunately this is not the case of Google
If you are paying for Google services and you aren't getting your money's worth, look elsewhere, IMO.
It's an important distinction. The second rate calendar apps pushed out by the phone manufacturer are generally pretty buggy and hardly ever see proper updates for security or bugs.
Solution: Download Google Calendar from the Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
Open it up and give it access to your calendar, contacts, etc as requested. Then go and disable the calendar app that came with your phone.
Or maybe it's time to brush up on Kotlin and just write it myself.
Searching around only returned me smartphone apps that connect to Google Calendar, with a couple of actual alternatives (Zoho, which I'm using as a primary email provider and can't set the freaking timezone right, and Outlook calendar, where I absolutely despise its web design).
It's like nobody's even trying to implement this properly. I'm trying out Yahoo's calendar now.
A German privacy focused mail provider where you also get a calendar. I didn't use the calendar yet but their mail servers are faster than anything else I've seen. And you can encrypt your whole account on their server so that noone but you can read your mails.
Edit: their English website is https://posteo.de/en
While Google's calendar does have a "Birthdays" calendar, it only includes birthdays from your Google+ contacts, and there's absolutely no way of adding a custom birthday into it. So, you would have to have a Google+ account and add every single person you want to include birthdays in as your Google+ contact.
Outlook's calendar has an option of connecting to Facebook and collecting birthday info from your friend list if you wish to. I know that Russian Mail.ru calendar also has this option (+ optional email alerts for birthdays). Pretty handy if you keep your Facebook friend list nice and short. You don't have to add all of them manually.