How to Use iCal Subscriptions for Your Family Calendar
If you've ever spent twenty minutes typing every date from your school's printout into your phone, you already understand the problem this solves.
Schools, sports leagues, community centers, and activity programs all publish schedules. Most of them publish those schedules as iCal feeds — a standard calendar format that any modern calendar app can read. But a lot of people never learn the feeds exist, and type the dates in by hand anyway.
A subscription skips all of that. You get a URL from the school or the league, paste it into your calendar app once, and every event on that schedule appears. When the schedule changes, the change comes with it.
What an iCal Feed Is
iCal (the iCalendar format, the one behind .ics files) is a standard way of writing calendar data down so other apps can read it. A calendar published as an iCal feed is a URL that delivers a read-only stream of events to whoever subscribes.
"Read-only" matters. You can't edit events from a subscribed calendar, because they're not yours to edit. They come from the source and change when the source changes. You're the subscriber, not the editor.
The practical effect: your school's calendar, your league's game and practice schedule, your kid's activity program — all of it can land in your calendar without you typing a single event.
Where to Find iCal URLs
The most common sources of iCal feeds for families:
School district websites. Many school districts publish district-wide and school-specific calendars as iCal feeds. Look for a "Subscribe" or "Add to Calendar" button on the school's calendar page, or a link that ends in .ics.
Sports leagues. Youth sports leagues increasingly publish game and practice schedules as feeds. Check your league's website or the scheduling platform they use — TeamSnap, SportsEngine, and similar platforms all support iCal export.
Community and activity programs. Libraries, community centers, and activity programs sometimes offer feeds for their class and event schedules.
Work calendars. Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook can both hand out a calendar as an iCal feed.
If you can't find a public link, email the school or organization directly. Many can produce one and never advertise it.
How to Subscribe in Google Calendar
On the web, at calendar.google.com:
- Find "Other calendars" in the left sidebar and click the "+" beside it
- Choose "From URL"
- Paste the feed URL and click "Add calendar"
The calendar appears under "Other calendars" and its events show up on your grid. Google decides for itself how often to re-read the feed, and it can take many hours to pick up a change. There's no refresh button.
How to Subscribe in Apple Calendar
On iPhone or iPad: Settings → Calendar → Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add Subscribed Calendar, then paste the URL. (On newer iPhones the Calendar settings sit under Settings → Apps.)
On a Mac: File → New Calendar Subscription, paste the URL, and Apple asks how often to refresh — anywhere from every five minutes to every week, or never. Pick a short interval for a schedule that changes often.
How to Subscribe in Outlook
In Outlook on the web, open Calendar, then Add calendar → Subscribe from web. Paste the URL, name the calendar, and save. Outlook re-reads the feed periodically.
Where Homsy Fits
Homsy does not take iCal feeds. There's no URL to paste and no subscription list in the app.
What Homsy does is import events from a Google calendar you connect. A member links their Google account, picks one calendar, and Homsy copies its events into the household calendar, where everyone in the household sees them. That's a Homsy Pro feature, and it runs one way — nothing flows out of Homsy to Google or to any other calendar app.
So there's one honest route for a school or league feed: subscribe to it in Google Calendar, then connect that Google calendar to Homsy. Worth knowing before you set it up — a member connects only one Google calendar, so the feed competes with their own.
The color coded family calendar guide covers how per-member colors work on the household calendar. For setting a shared calendar up from scratch, the family calendar setup guide walks through the whole process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Homsy subscribe to iCal feeds?
No. Homsy does not take iCal, ICS, or webcal URLs. It imports events from one Google calendar per member, which needs Homsy Pro — so the way to get a school feed into Homsy is to subscribe to that feed in Google Calendar and connect that calendar.
How often do subscribed calendars update?
It depends on the app. Google refreshes subscribed feeds on its own schedule and can take many hours. Apple Calendar lets you choose the interval on a Mac. Outlook refreshes periodically. None of them are instant, so treat a subscribed schedule as current within a day, not within a minute.
Can I edit events from a subscribed calendar?
No. Feeds are read-only in every calendar app. The events belong to whoever publishes them, and a change has to be made at the source. If you need to add something of your own — the away ground's address, who's driving — add a separate event.
What is an iCal subscription and how is it different from importing a calendar?
Importing a calendar copies the events once, and later changes at the source never reach you. Subscribing keeps the link. When the source calendar updates, your app picks the update up on its next refresh.
What if my school doesn't publish an iCal feed?
Ask them. Many organizations can produce a feed and never advertise it. If there genuinely isn't one, you're back to adding the dates by hand — do it once, at the start of term, from the printed calendar.