Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, and travel time

September 2026

The DOFOTT figure looking at a phone, puzzled, a location pin above it

DOFOTT works with Google Calendar only, and a lot of people who use Google Calendar never open it. They look at their day in Apple Calendar, on a Mac or an iPhone, and the question is fair: if I live in Apple's app, does any of this reach me?

Usually yes. Apple Calendar is a window, not a calendar. What matters is whose calendar you are looking through it.

If your events live in a Google account

This is the common case: a work or personal Google account added to Apple Calendar, with the events themselves stored at Google. Apple's app shows them; it does not own them.

Everything works. DOFOTT connects to the Google account, reads the calendars you tick, and writes its blocks there. They come down to Apple Calendar like any other event, before and after each meeting with a place, marked free so your own alerts stay quiet. You never have to open Google Calendar for it.

If your events live in iCloud

Then DOFOTT cannot see them, and nothing will happen. An iCloud calendar is Apple's, and DOFOTT asks Google for calendars, not Apple. There is no clever way around this and we would rather say so than let you sign up and wonder.

Apple Calendar does have a travel-time setting of its own for those calendars, which is a fine thing and older than we are. Its limit is that it stays in Apple's world: a colleague looking at a shared calendar, or you on a work laptop in a browser, sees nothing where your drive is.

How to tell which one you have

Apple Calendar groups calendars by the account they come from.

On a Mac: open the calendar list on the left. The headings are accounts — iCloud, Gmail, the name of a work account. Find the calendar your meetings go into and read the heading above it.
On an iPhone: tap Calendars at the bottom. Same grouping, same headings.

If your meetings sit under the Google account, you are in the first case. If they sit under iCloud, the second.

Editing from Apple, with DOFOTT running

Change an event in Apple Calendar and the change goes up to Google, because that is where the event lives. DOFOTT sees it there and moves the blocks with it. Three things are worth knowing:

It is a little slower. A change made in Google Calendar reaches DOFOTT in seconds. One made in Apple Calendar has to reach Google first, on Apple's own schedule, and then it reaches us. Half a minute is normal.
Deleting a block counts. If you delete one of DOFOTT's blocks in Apple Calendar, that is the same as deleting it anywhere else: it stays deleted for that event and never comes back, unless the meeting moves somewhere new.
Your own events are safe either way. DOFOTT only ever touches blocks it wrote itself, and it can tell which ones those are.

The short version

Google account shown in Apple Calendar: works, and you never need to leave Apple's app. Events in iCloud: not for you, at least not today.

If you are in the first case and want the drive to stop being invisible, setting it up takes a minute and is free during the beta. If you would rather see what it costs to keep doing it by hand, that is here.