Is there a When2meet app? Using it on your phone, and what to use instead

When2meet is a free website: you create an event, share the link, and everyone paints the hours they are free onto a grid. There is no account, no email and no app. The link is the only way back to an event, so whoever loses it has lost the event.

That simplicity is why clubs and student groups love it, and it is also why it is awkward on a phone. What you get on a phone is the desktop page, made smaller.

Search the app stores for When2meet and you will find apps with similar names. They come from other developers, and none of them says it is connected to When2meet. Some are reasonable scheduling tools in their own right, but an event made in one of them cannot be opened in another, so if your group is already using a When2meet link, an app will not help you answer it.

The same goes for the web. Sites with When2meet-like names and layouts show up in searches for When2meet without being the original. The original lives at when2meet.com. If a link you were sent opens anywhere else, it is a different service, with its own rules about your data.

Turn the phone sideways first. In landscape the grid gets enough width for each half hour to be a target you can actually hit, and the page has less reason to scroll while you are trying to select.

Zoom in on the days you need and drag in short strokes, one day at a time. On a touch screen the same gesture means both 'scroll the page' and 'select these hours', and the browser often guesses wrong. A short drag that goes wrong is quicker to fix than a long one.

Type your name into the event before you start marking, and keep the link somewhere you will find it: in the chat it arrived in, or as a bookmark. There is no confirmation email and no list of your events to fall back on.

Dragging and scrolling fight each other. It is the complaint people make most often about When2meet on a phone, and there is no setting that fixes it.

Nobody is told anything. There is no notification when people answer, no reminder for the ones who have not, and no message when a time is chosen. The organiser keeps checking the page, and everyone else waits to hear.

Time zones need care. When2meet's own form says that for weekly events, the kind set up as days of the week rather than dates, everyone is expected to be in the same time zone. If your group is spread out, use specific dates, and say the time zone in the message that carries the link.

And the result is a heat map, not a decision. The darkest cell shows when most people are free, but someone still has to pick a time and tell the group, usually in the same chat the grid was meant to replace.

A grid earns its place when you genuinely have no idea when anyone is free and want to see a whole week. Most of the time you already have two or three good options, and then a grid is the slow way to ask.

A poll turns those options into buttons. On Decider each person taps Yes, Maybe or No next to each time, sees every option in their own time zone, and can change their answers later from the same link. When the votes are in, the organiser locks the time and everyone adds it to their calendar in one tap. The people you invite never sign up; only the organiser has an account.

The two also work together. If you like When2meet for finding the overlap, find it there, then put the best two or three slots in a poll and let the group pick.