Google Calendar is genuinely good
Let us be clear: Google Calendar is an excellent personal calendar. It handles recurring events reliably, integrates with most services, works across devices, and costs nothing. For individual use, it is hard to fault.
The problem appears when you try to use it as a household tool. It was not designed for that. The mental model is one person managing their own time, perhaps with some visibility into colleagues' availability.
Adapting a personal productivity tool to serve a household of four or five people involves workarounds. Workarounds accumulate. Eventually the system becomes more effort than it is worth.
Family sharing requires awkward workarounds
To share your Google Calendar with a family member, you either grant them access to your personal calendar, which means they see everything, or you create a separate shared calendar and try to maintain two in parallel.
Neither works cleanly. The first raises privacy questions. The second means adding events in two places, which most people stop doing within a few weeks.
What families actually want is to see everyone's calendars overlaid into one view, without sharing everything or entering events twice. That is not quite what Google Calendar offers.
The household view does not exist
Knowing what the family is doing next week means opening multiple calendars, making sure they are all visible, and mentally combining them into one picture. That works for the person who set it up. It does not work for a teenager who glances at a screen for ten seconds.
A family calendar needs to be glanceable. One look, one picture of the week. A personal calendar with overlay settings is not quite that.
The display problem is significant. A calendar that lives in an app requires someone to open the app. Most family members will not do that consistently, and you cannot blame them.
Notifications assume one person
Google Calendar's notification system is built around alerting whoever created the event. You can invite guests, but the underlying assumptions are individual.
A reminder about the dentist appointment needs to reach whoever is responsible for getting the children there, not just whoever added it. This requires manual workarounds: inviting specific people rather than relying on household-level visibility.
This is solvable, but it requires everyone to be properly set up and disciplined about it. That is more ongoing effort than most households sustain.
The gap it leaves
Google Calendar is excellent at what it was built for. The gap is in what family life actually requires: a shared view that does not need configuring, a way to capture school dates without typing them all in manually, a wall display that a ten-year-old can read at a glance.
Kerfuff sits alongside Google Calendar rather than replacing it. People who already use Google Calendar keep using it. The family view pulls it in automatically and adds the layers that household life needs.