When Apple Watch and Watch OS 1.0 shipped in April, the definite omission of an Apple Reminders app on the platform was particularly surprising to me. The Apple Watch User Guide even highlights the app’s absence:
There’s no Reminders app on Apple Watch, but Apple Watch notifies you of reminders you create in the Reminders app on your iPhone—and on any other iOS device or Mac that’s signed in using your Apple ID. Also, you can create reminders using Siri on Apple Watch.
Creating and responding to reminders is fine, but my girlfriend and I use a shared iCloud Reminders list for our grocery list, and being able to glance at the watch as you walk through the supermarket without pulling out the iPhone is an ideal use case for Apple Watch. Fortunately, Flexibits has developed a new version of its Fantastical app for iPhone that brings the full Reminders experience to Apple Watch, fulfilling an important use case for the watch I had in mind before it arrived.
Fantastical for Apple Watch also brings the excellent streamlined calendar list view to the watch, complete with the app’s easy-to-use natural language parsing feature that sets it apart from Apple’s own calendar app…
Even if you’re a fan of Apple’s built-in Calendar on Apple Watch, Fantastical’s unified list view of upcoming calendar entries and reminder items offers a bit of a bird’s eye view of your schedule on the watch. Fantastical’s dark user interface with splashes of color representing specific calendars or reminder lists fits right in with Watch OS, and you can still use Apple’s calendar app on Apple Watch for viewing the calendar as a full month or timeline of the current day by the hour.
Fantastical can’t yet include a watch face complication like Apple’s calendar app, but that’s certainly in the cards for developers in the future as Mark has reported. Fantastical does include an attractive and useful glance that you can swipe up from the watch face. The Fantastical glance features a horizontal timeline across the top with your next event or reminder item and appointment time below, or if the rest of your calendar is clear for the day, you get a friendly Fantastical character encouraging you to enjoy your open schedule.
Tapping the Fantastical glance behaves like any other third-party glance and opens the corresponding app from the watch face. I do find that the Fantastical’s darker colored glance fits in much better on Apple Watch than Apple’s mostly white, card-like glance, but you’re free to use either, both, or neither and still enjoy Fantastical. I’m personally only using Fantastical’s glance as I don’t find that Apple’s Calendar glance adds much additional information, if any.
As I mentioned enthusiastically at the top, Fantastical brings Reminders to Apple Watch in a big way. Where Apple stops at alerts and creating new reminders, Fantastical lets you view whole lists of reminders including notes or URLs included. This makes using Apple Watch as a convenient portal into my shopping list at the supermarket a possibility. You can use Siri to say something like “Add milk to my shopping list” and it appears right in the app. Similarly, firmly press within any given reminders list to add a new item to that specific list. The same method using Force Touch applies to creating calendar events from the calendar list view.
Because Fantastical reads your Reminders with a capital R, you can use Apple’s official Reminders app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and still enjoy Fantastical on Apple Watch as your iCloud-syncing, true Reminders solution. Other apps offer similar list functionality, but don’t speak the same language as Apple’s iCloud-syncing Reminders. Using Fantastical on Apple Watch for Reminders has been among my favorite Apple Watch app experiences yet if you haven’t guessed yet that.
There are also other goodies with Fantastical for Apple Watch like handoff support to the Mac. Customization options on Fantastical for iPhone let you set whether you even want to see events on Apple Watch, or reminders on Apple Watch, what the Fantastical glance displays, whether or not reminders are organized by lists or if that view is removed from the hierarchy on the watch, and more.
Fantastical 2 for iPhone and now Apple Watch is available as a free update to the latest version of the app. New Fantastical customers can purchase the app for iPhone and Apple Watch for $4.99 on the App Store. Fantastical 2 is also available on iPad and most recently the Mac as a full calendar solution.
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omg all the events in those screenshots are taking place in two towns right near me. lol
Thanks, finally received my watch and I’m looking for good apps.
Is the desktop app still exorbitantly priced? It is? Okay…
Amazing! Just the app I was expecting. Really missing the habitability to have a place in my apple watch where to look my reminders lists. Perfectly synchronized with Calendars and Reminders, this app is really useful and well designed
Still waiting for Facebook and Spotify
I don’t know about everyone else but I really get annoyed when I have to pay money for features that should come as standard. The app is £4. I just don’t understand how a developer can produce an app that appears so advanced, yet Apple can only produce a basic calendar app on Apple Watch. You can’t even see your next month’s appointments!
Unless I’m missing something my Fantastical Apple Watch app works totally different than your description.
#1 – when I open the app it only allows me to see the current day (not talking about the glance)
#2 – it shows me all of my reminders in one list, and doesn’t allow me to pick a specific list like your “lists” screenshot.
All in all I still think I like Reminders Nano (faster) for my lists and the built in AW Calendar (complication). Finally, to me glances on the watch make no sense. Maybe because I use the “resume to previous activity” and treat my Apple Watch like a small iPhone.
On the watch app, you should see a “Reminders” item under “Today”. Clicking on that should display all your Reminder lists. You can click on them to view individually.
The watch app, though, doesn’t let you view lists separately for some reason.
Re #2, go into settings. There’s an option for grouping reminders by lists, both for the iOS and Watch apps.
Thanks! I didn’t have time to look through the settings, but I’m really pleased that they decided to separate the Apple Watch display settings. Its nice to have granular control of each.
I’m not sure if I’ll use this app heavily, or if I’ll stick with the Reminders Nano. Seems like the calendar only adds the ability to adjust/dismiss the calendar item. You lose the options to change your accept/decline and your ability to email the meetting creator. I guess creating a meeting/event is nice but I can do that via Siri right?
This is awesome. Unfortunately, the watch app doesn’t list Reminders in the right order and the iPhone app doesn’t let you view Reminder lists separately.
Looks like Fantastical displays all reminders in alphabetical order,both in the iOS and Watch apps, ignoring the order in which the user has arranged them in Apple’s Reminders app. That’s not good.
Apparently the Apple Watch app has a bug in the reminders portion that borks up notifications coming through on the Apple Watch and the iPhone. According to the developer a new version was hopefully submitted today hoping for expedited approval. Here’s hoping. Prior to the new version with a Watch App, actionable notifications via Fantastical worked very well on the Apple Watch.
The Watch app is very buggy. When you tap on an event in glances it just freezes the app. When it does decide to work, you can’t look at upcoming events, only today view. Poor attempt.