Sam Benson

Most developers who work with calendars eventually hit the same strange bug. Someone subscribes to your ICS feed. Everything looks fine. Then a day or two later nothing updates. Events go missing. Times drift. Outlook users swear the feed is frozen. Google polls whenever it feels like it. Apple refreshes until it doesn t.

You debug your code. You check the ICS. You regenerate the file. You wonder if you broke SEQUENCE again.

None of it fixes the problem.

If you have ever sent calendar invites from your own backend, you have probably seen this problem:

• You send an event update

• The ICS file validates

• Google Calendar imports it without errors

• Nothing changes

No error. No warning. The update simply does not apply.

This is one of the most common issues developers face when working with ICS. The root cause is that Google interprets the specification differently from Outlook and Apple Calendar. The behaviour is not random. It is the result of several strict internal checks.

Hey everyone, here's a quick update on Synara, my API for delivering calendar invites that don t break across Google, Outlook, Apple, and ICS.

We re finally getting close to launch, and I wanted to share where things stand and what s left.

Where we're at