Why You Need an All-in-One Media Tracker
Before we built Calendia, everyone on our team had some version of the same setup: Letterboxd for movies, Trakt for TV shows, MusicButler for album releases, and a mental note for games (which never worked for anyone, ever, not once).
Each app was fine on its own. The problem was us. We'd check Letterboxd all the time because we liked logging movies, open Trakt maybe once a week when we remembered it existed, and MusicButler would just sit there untouched for a month or more before someone would go "oh right, I have that app." Multiple times this happened.
We were great at knowing what movies were coming out and completely terrible at everything else.
Why "just use multiple apps" doesn't hold up
Sounds reasonable on the surface: each media type has dedicated apps built for it, so just use the best one for each category and you're covered, right?
Except nobody we've ever talked to actually does this consistently over time. You'll have one or two apps you check regularly because they're on your home screen or you genuinely enjoy using them, and then two or three others that slowly fade into the background of your phone. It's the same reason nobody maintains five different to-do lists. The groceries list survives because you need it at the store. The "home improvement projects" list dies within a week because you never open that app at the right moment.
We hear this from users constantly. They sign up for Calendia and tell us they tried the multi-app approach first, and the story is always the same: one tracker won, the rest collected dust.
Stuff we personally missed
Tyler, the Creator dropped an album and even though we had MusicButler installed and followed him on it, we didn't find out for four days because we'd turned off MusicButler's notifications months earlier since we never used the app and the badge was annoying. Found out from a friend at dinner.
A show one of us had been watching for three seasons came back for its final run, and all anyone on the team could remember was "sometime in the fall" without an actual date, so of course someone saw spoilers on Reddit before we even realized the premiere had already happened.
And a book sequel from an author we really like, which still stings because we absolutely would have pre-ordered it if we'd known. Instead someone found it on a bookstore shelf months after it came out.
None of these were obscure indie releases. These were things we cared about from creators we actively followed, but our attention was just spread across too many apps and most of those apps weren't getting opened. That's literally the problem we built Calendia to solve.
What consolidation actually changes
The calendar view is the core of the app and it's what people end up using the most: open it, glance at what's coming this week and next week, done, thirty seconds. The thing that makes it work is that because it covers movies and shows and music and games all at once, there's almost always something on the calendar for any given week, which means people actually bother to open the app, which means they see everything including the stuff they might have missed otherwise.
We added actor and director following kind of late in development and it turned out to be one of the most popular features, which we honestly didn't expect. Follow a director whose movies you always go see and you'll find out about their next project the moment it gets announced, which beats Googling "has [director name] done anything new" every couple months by a lot. Same deal with authors.
Spotify import was a priority from day one because we knew that if we asked people to manually find and follow every artist they listen to, they'd get through maybe twenty before giving up and never coming back. Auto-importing gets you to full coverage in about a minute.
What we're not trying to be
Letterboxd is better than us at movie logging and reviews, full stop. It has a social layer with friend activity and lists and a whole community built around discussing film. If you love that stuff, keep using it.
We're also not a discussion platform and we're never going to be as good as a dedicated subreddit or Discord server for deep conversations about a specific show or game.
We track release dates across every media type and we do it in one place. That's our thing, and we think the "one place" part is what makes the difference between a tracker you use and a tracker you forget about.
Give it a shot
Download Calendia on iOS or Android, import your music from Spotify or Apple Music, spend a few minutes following the shows and actors and games and authors you care about, and turn on notifications.
Give it a week. If you're someone who has five entertainment apps on your phone and only opens two of them, we think you'll get why we built this. Free to download, about ten minutes to set up.