Etar

Etar is a calendar app started by Suhail Alkowaileet and now maintained by a small team of volunteers. Its README: “Etar … is an open source material designed calendar made for everyone!”, and, about where it comes from, “The application is an enhanced version of AOSP Calendar”, the calendar app in Android’s open-source code. The name comes from Arabic. It is actively maintained: version 1.0.57 came out in July 2026, after a switch to Material 3 the year before.

How it works

Etar doesn’t keep a calendar database of its own. It reads and writes the events in Android’s calendar storage, the system component that other calendar apps and sync apps also use. In the README’s words, it “Uses Android calendar storage to show all synchronized calendars.” So:

• A Google account on the phone: its calendars appear in Etar, kept in sync by Google’s services, not by Etar.
• Nextcloud and other CalDAV servers: a sync app such as DAVx⁵ syncs them into the calendar storage, and Etar shows them. Its settings have shortcuts to add a CalDAV or an EteSync calendar.
• Offline calendars: Etar creates them itself, on the phone only; the app explains that they “are NOT synchronized to a cloud service and only available on your phone.”

You can choose which calendars are shown and which one new events go into.

What it does

• Month, week, day and agenda views, light and dark themes, and an agenda widget for the home screen.
• Reminders as notifications.
• Sharing an event as an .ics file, and importing .ics files, with the warning above.
• Overlapping events in a staggered layout, an option added in 1.0.57 and off by default.
• Places in events open in your maps app.

Offline

Etar declares no internet permission, so Android doesn’t let it open network connections. Its privacy policy says the same: “Etar does not use the Internet permission at all.” There are no weather forecasts, holiday lists or update checks. When you tap refresh, Etar asks the phone’s sync accounts to sync; any going online is done by those apps.

The permissions it asks for

Fifteen. Calendar read and write are the core. Contacts is optional and asked for the first time you create an event; the README says it “can be rejected. But then search and location suggestions no longer work.” Accounts is for the refresh, and exact alarms, notifications, vibration and a foreground service are for reminders. After you grant calendar access it also asks to be exempted from battery optimisation, so that reminders arrive on time; a setting turns that check off, with the warning “Use at your own risk!”. The network-state, start-at-boot and wake-lock permissions come from Android’s WorkManager library, which schedules the reminders, and one is added by AndroidX for internal use.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s build of version 1.0.57, compiled from the source and signed with F-Droid’s key. The project doesn’t publish APKs on GitHub; a maintainer: “We don’t provide apks.”
• LineageOS includes its own copy of Etar under a different package name, org.lineageos.etar, so this one installs next to it.
• The 9.2 MB file runs on Android 6.0 and later and has no native code, so it works on any processor. Our scan found no trackers.
• Etar is licensed under the GPL-3.0; the parts that come from AOSP Calendar are under the Apache-2.0.
• The screenshots come from the project’s F-Droid listing and show the interface from 2020, before the Material 3 redesign.

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.