SyncSessions

Features

• Availability heat mapThe band leader sees at a glance when everyone is free. Each hour is color-coded — green when everyone can make it, orange when some can, red when only a few can.
• Individual color overlaysView each musician's schedule in their own color, overlaid on the grid so you can see exactly who is conflicted.
• Real-time syncChanges appear instantly across every device in the group via iCloud. When a musician updates their calendar, the grid updates live.
• Calendar privacyImport a calendar or don't — the grid works either way. If you do, only free/busy blocks are shared. Event titles, descriptions, attendees, and any other calendar detail stay completely private.
• Session confirmationOnce a time slot is chosen, the leader locks it in with studio name and address. All musicians are notified immediately.
• AI scheduling suggestionsOn-device AI (Apple Foundation Models) suggests the best available windows and summarizes conflicts — privately, offline, and free.
• Call musicians directlyTap any musician in a conflict to call or message them without leaving the app.
• Free for musiciansOnly band leaders subscribe. If you are invited to a band, you never pay — for that band or any other.
• Saved contactsTap a bandmate's avatar to pick them from your contacts. Their phone, email and photo are saved to your own private iCloud — visible only to you, never to your bandmates.
• Ask SiriMake a group, propose a session or change your profile by voice, on iPhone, iPad and Mac. See every command.

How It Works

1. The session leader subscribes, creates a group, and invites musicians via iCloud share link. Musicians do not need a subscription.
2. Each musician accepts the invite — on an Apple device, or in a web browser on any platform.
3. SyncSessions optionally reads their calendar (free/busy only) and uploads their availability to the shared session.
4. The heat map updates in real time as musicians' availability is received.
5. The leader taps the best slot, confirms the session, and everyone is notified.

User Guide

Separate instructions for iPhone, iPad, Mac and the web app — because they genuinely differ. You swipe a group on iPhone and right-click it on a Mac, some commands are keyboard shortcuts on the Mac only, and a few things the apps can do are not available in a browser at all. The guide says which is which rather than describing one platform and leaving you to translate.

It covers creating a group and inviting musicians, proposing a session, marking your availability, reading the group view and the leader's heat map, and every setting in your profile.

SyncSessions for Web

It runs on Android, Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS, and in Safari or Chrome on Apple devices. Nothing to install, though it can be added to your home screen or dock like a normal app.

What you can do in a browser

• Accept an invite link and join a band
• See the group's availability build up live, everyone's alongside your own
• Set and update your own availability
• View sessions, studio locations, and who is confirmed
• If you lead a band: see the availability heat map, create sessions, edit and confirm them, manage your groups, and copy a band's invite link to pass on

What still needs an Apple device

Two things, both platform limits rather than choices:

• Setting up each band's invite link. A band's invite link is created on an iPhone, iPad or Mac. Once a band has one, the leader can copy and send it from anywhere, including the SyncSessions Web App — and joining from a browser has always worked.
• Your very first band — and only that one. Creating it needs an iPhone, iPad or Mac, because that is where you subscribe. Every band and session after it can be created in the browser just as well.

Neither affects joining. If you have been invited, everything you need works in the browser, and there is nothing to buy.

An Apple Account is required

The web app signs in with Sign in with Apple, because everything is stored in iCloud and there is no separate account system. This is the button to look for:

An Apple Account (formerly Apple ID) is free, and you do not need to own any Apple hardware to have one. You can create one from any browser on any platform:

• How to create a new Apple Account — Apple's step-by-step guide. Choose Web from the device menu near the top; Android, Linux and ChromeOS are not listed, and Web is the route that works from all of them.

Calendars in the browser

A browser cannot read your device calendar the way an iPhone can, so there is no calendar permission to grant. If you would rather not fill the grid in by hand, you can export an .ics file from Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar and drop it in — a shortcut, not a requirement.

The file is read inside your browser and never uploaded, exactly as on the Apple apps.

Notifications

The web app does not raise notifications. Leave the tab open and everything updates live; otherwise check back, or ask your leader to message you once the session is confirmed.

Ask Siri

Say what you want and SyncSessions does it — "Add a Sync Sessions group", "Add a session for The Beatles in Sync Sessions", "Set my Sync Sessions color to green". Anything the command cannot carry, Siri asks for: a band's name is yours to invent, so it is answered rather than guessed at.

Every command opens the app, so you see what happened rather than take Siri's word for it. Nothing is deleted by voice — removing a group, a session or a member stays in the app, where you can see exactly what you are removing.

More than Siri hears

Apple gives every app ten ready-made Siri phrases — ten each, for every app on your phone, so that no one app can lay claim to what Siri listens for. Everything SyncSessions can do also appears in Apple's Shortcuts app, where there is no such limit: add any command to a shortcut of your own and name it whatever you would actually say. A shortcut's name is its own trigger, so it needs no app name at all.

Subscription

SyncSessions is freemium: only band leaders subscribe, and musicians use it free.

The split is by role, not by feature. Musicians are not on a reduced tier being nudged to upgrade — they get the whole app, permanently, and there is nothing for them to buy.

If someone invites you to their band, you never pay — not for that band, and not for any other band you are invited to. You can accept invitations, submit your availability, see how the group's availability lines up, view confirmed sessions and export them to your calendar, for as long as you like, without a subscription.

A subscription is needed only to run your own band: creating a group and inviting musicians to it.

Both plans are the same subscription — only the billing period differs. New subscribers receive a 2-month free introductory period.

A subscription includes: unlimited groups and sessions; up to 20 musicians in each group, including you; and free participation for every musician you invite. The 20-musician limit is not a billing tier — beyond 20, the availability grid runs out of distinct colors to give each musician.

Leading requires an Apple device, because App Store billing is the only way to subscribe. Musicians can take part from anything. If you are invited to a band today and want to start your own later, subscribe then — your existing memberships are unaffected.

Subscriptions are managed through your Apple Account. Cancel anytime in Settings → [Your Name] → Subscriptions on iPhone or iPad, or App Store → [Your Name] → Manage Subscriptions on Mac.

Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 2026

What SyncSessions Stores

SyncSessions stores the following in your own iCloud. None of it is collected by the developer, who operates no servers and cannot read it — which is why the App Store privacy label reads "Data Not Collected."

What SyncSessions Does Not Collect

• Calendar event titles, descriptions, attendees, or locations
• Your address book as a whole — only the individual contacts you explicitly choose, one at a time. This holds on the Mac too, where the permission itself covers every contact: access granted is not data read
• Contact street addresses, birthdays, notes, or any field beyond the phone, email, and photo of a contact you select
• Audio of any kind — dictation runs entirely on your device, and nothing you say is recorded, stored, or transmitted
• Any data for advertising or analytics purposes
• Any data on a developer-operated server

No Custom Servers

SyncSessions operates no backend infrastructure. All data is stored in Apple iCloud, which is governed by Apple's Privacy Policy.

This holds for the web app too. It is a set of static files served by GitHub Pages, and your browser talks to Apple iCloud directly — no SyncSessions server sits in between, because there isn't one. GitHub delivers the page; none of your band's data passes through it.

iCloud Storage

Storing everything in iCloud has a consequence worth stating plainly: what SyncSessions saves counts against your iCloud storage, the same as anything else you keep there. There is no separate SyncSessions storage, and no way for there to be.

The amount is small. Availability is a set of time blocks, sessions are a few fields each, and the only items with any real size are photos.

A band's storage belongs to its leader. Its sessions, its members and everyone's availability live in the iCloud account of the leader who created the group, because that is the account the band is shared from — including the availability each musician submits. So being invited to a band costs you no storage, just as it costs you no money. What counts against your own iCloud is only what is yours alone: your profile, and any contact details you have saved.

Calendar Access

Reading your calendar is optional. You set your availability by tapping it out on the grid, and SyncSessions never asks for your calendar unless you choose to import one — there is no permission prompt at launch and nothing is withheld if you decline.

If you do import, read access is used to seed the grid, and only time blocks (free or busy) are extracted. Never event titles, notes, attendees, or any other detail. Calendar data is processed on-device, and you can edit anything it fills in.

In the web app there is no calendar permission at all — a browser cannot reach your device calendar. You upload an .ics export instead, and it is parsed inside your browser: the file itself is never transmitted, and only the free/busy blocks derived from it are shared with your group.

Contacts Access

SyncSessions never reads your address book in bulk. When you tap a bandmate's avatar and pick someone from your contacts, SyncSessions saves that one contact's phone number, email address, and photo to your own private iCloud database, so the details are available on your other devices.

That information is visible only to you. It is never shared with your bandmates, never written to any record other members can read, and never accessible to the developer. You can replace or remove a saved contact at any time from the same avatar.

On iPhone and iPad, choosing a contact grants SyncSessions access to only that contact — the app never requests access to your full address book.

On a Mac it works differently, because macOS grants Contacts all at once. Saving a bandmate still costs no permission at all — their name, phone number and email come from the single contact you pick. Only their photo needs more, because reading it means going back to your contacts for it, and macOS offers no way to grant one contact at a time. That is why the Mac asks once, in My Profile → Contacts, where you can read what it means before deciding, rather than springing a prompt on you the moment you tap an avatar. Allowing it does hand SyncSessions your whole address book. Declining costs you only the pictures, and saved contacts show initials instead.

Granting that access does not change what is read or stored. Even with it allowed, SyncSessions saves one contact at a time — the ones you choose — and never reads, uploads, or indexes the rest of your address book. It never writes to your contacts at all — nothing is added, changed or removed. You can withdraw it whenever you like under Privacy & Security → Contacts in System Settings.

Diagnostics You Choose to Send

If support asks for them, My Profile → Contact Support can produce two files: a diagnostic log of recent app activity, and a report of your SyncSessions iCloud data. Both describe your groups, sessions and app activity by name.

Nothing is transmitted automatically. Each file is written to your device and handed to the standard share sheet, so you can read it first and decide whether to send it, and to whom. If you never use the feature, nothing is ever produced and nothing is ever collected.

When you do send one to support, the developer receives exactly what is in that file and nothing else. It is used to investigate the problem you reported and is not retained beyond that, shared, or used for any other purpose.

Microphone and Dictation

The microphone is only ever asked for at the moment you use it. SyncSessions never requests it at launch or during setup. A small microphone sits at the edge of each text field, and tapping one is what raises the permission prompts — two of them, one after the other: the microphone, then speech recognition, which dictation also needs. So you are only asked once you have said you want to dictate.

What you say is turned into text on your device and put in that field, replacing whatever it held. No audio is recorded, stored, or transmitted — not to the developer, and not to Apple. iOS opens the speech recognition prompt with Apple's own fixed sentence about speech data being sent to Apple; it appears in every app that asks, and SyncSessions requires on-device recognition — refusing to dictate at all where it is unavailable — so it does not apply here. Only the resulting text is saved, exactly as if you had typed it.

Declining costs you nothing else: every field still works exactly as before, and the keyboard's own dictation is unaffected. You can grant or revoke microphone and speech recognition access at any time in Settings, and those choices are per device, because system permissions are.

On-Device AI

Scheduling suggestions and conflict summaries use Apple's Foundation Models framework, which runs entirely on your device. No data is sent to any server for AI processing.

Sign in with Apple

SyncSessions uses Sign in with Apple for authentication. No passwords are created or stored by SyncSessions.

Children's Privacy

SyncSessions is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Deleting Your Data

You can delete everything SyncSessions holds for you from inside the app, at any time.

In the app: open My Profile — the profile button in the sidebar on iPhone and iPad, or SyncSessions → My Profile… (⌘⇧,) on Mac — and choose Delete My SyncSessions Data. Before anything is removed you are shown exactly what will be affected, named group by group.

This permanently deletes your profile; every contact detail you saved by tapping a bandmate's avatar; your availability and membership in every group you belong to; and every group you lead, including its sessions and all members' availability — deleting a group you lead removes it for everyone in it.

Your subscription is not affected; Apple manages billing separately. Groups you were only a member of continue without you. Deletion cannot be undone.

Removing a single saved contact: tap that member's avatar anywhere their photo appears and choose Remove Contact — their phone number, email address and photo are deleted from your private iCloud immediately, on every device you own.

Through Apple: the button above is the only way to remove just your SyncSessions data. Apple's own tools work on the whole account, and take everything else in it with them.

• Delete everything in your iCloud account: Visit privacy.apple.com and sign in with your Apple Account to request deletion of your iCloud data. That includes your SyncSessions records, along with everything every other app and service has stored there.
• Delete your Apple Account entirely: Visit Apple to permanently delete your Apple Account and all associated data across all Apple services.

Support

Requirements

Apple apps — iPhone, iPad, Mac

• iPhone or iPad running iOS / iPadOS 26 or later
• Mac running macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later
• iCloud account (Apple Account with iCloud enabled)
• Active SyncSessions subscription — to lead a band. Invited musicians do not need one.

Web app — Android, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS

• Any modern browser: Safari, Chrome, Edge, or Firefox
• An Apple Account, used to sign in to iCloud — free, and no Apple hardware needed (how to create one)
• An invitation from a band leader
• No subscription — invited musicians take part for free

Click here to open the SyncSessions Web App