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Maple Family App Is Shutting Down on 31 December: What Survives, and What You Have to Save Yourself

The NestBoard Team · 2026-09-21

If you are reading this because the Maple family app is shutting down, here is the part that matters most: you have until 31 December 2026, and after that the data is gone rather than archived. Maple's own notice says accounts become inaccessible and all data is deleted with no way to recover it. Annual subscriptions have stopped renewing, and monthly ones run until the shutdown.

Maple was a genuinely good product. Its team was acquired by Wander, the travel company, in an announcement made in late July 2026, and the founders moved over to work on Wander's platform. That is a normal outcome for a venture-backed app and it is still a rotten thing to have happen to your household, because the calendar that held everyone's week is now on a countdown.

This guide is about the boring, practical part: working out what you already have safely stored somewhere else, what you have to rescue by hand, and what you will lose no matter which app you move to. We make NestBoard, which is one of the places people land, so weigh the last section accordingly. Everything before it applies wherever you go.

The dates, in one place

• 31 December 2026. Maple shuts down. Accounts become inaccessible after that.
• After that date. Data is deleted with no recovery, and the connections Maple held to outside services stop.
• Right now. Annual subscriptions are no longer renewing. Monthly ones run to the end.

There is no extension to plan around and no archive to come back to, so treat the deadline as real rather than as a prompt to think about it in November.

Step one: find out which of your events are already safe

Most guides tell you that calendar events sync out to Google, Apple or Outlook and are therefore fine. That is true for some of your calendar and not for the rest, and the difference is the whole job. Maple connected to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Microsoft and TeamSnap, so a household that used those connections has two kinds of event sitting side by side in the same view, and Maple does not make them look different.

Do this check before anything else, and do it outside Maple.

1. Open the calendar you connected, on the web, not through Maple. Google Calendar in a browser, iCloud.com, or Outlook on the web.
2. Look at the next four weeks, then look at a month you know had a lot going on, like the start of the school term.
3. Anything you can see there survives 31 December on its own, because it was never really Maple's to delete.
4. Anything you can find in Maple and cannot find there is Maple-native. That is your actual to-do list.

In most households the Maple-native pile is smaller than expected and more important than expected. It tends to be the things somebody typed straight into the family app: the recurring swim lesson, the custody pattern, the appointments added on the school run, the reminders that only ever mattered to this house.

One caution while you are in there. Do not disconnect Maple from Google or Apple as a tidying-up step before you have checked. Disconnect after you have confirmed the events you care about are visible in the source calendar, not before.

What a calendar file actually carries, and what it quietly drops

Whatever you move to, the calendar will travel as an .ics file or an iCal link, which is the one genuinely universal format in this corner of the world. It is worth knowing what that format carries, because people are routinely blindsided by what does not arrive.

An .ics reliably carries the event title, the start and end, whether it is an all-day event, the location, the notes, and the repeat rule. Reminders and attendees are in the standard too, though whether the receiving app honours them varies a lot.

What does not come across in any way the apps agree on is the part families actually use to read a calendar at a glance: which person the event belongs to. Colour coding, the per-member split, the avatar on the block, all of that is the app's own idea rather than anything in the file. When people say a migrated calendar "looks wrong", this is almost always what they mean. The events are all there and nothing is colour-coded to a kid any more.

We will be straight about our own end of this. NestBoard's calendar export writes the title, the notes, the location, the times and the repeat rule, and it does not write who the event is for. Neither does anyone else's, as far as we can tell, and that is the honest state of the format rather than a gap anyone is about to close. Plan on reassigning events to people by hand after an import, or on assigning only the recurring ones and letting the rest go.

Two smaller things worth expecting. Some exporters flatten a repeating series into a long list of individual events, which works fine until you want to change the time of a weekly lesson and discover there is no series to edit. And attachments, photos and anything threaded onto an event as a comment do not travel at all.

The things with no file format at all

Lists, recipes, meal plans, chores, routines and folders have no .ics equivalent. There is no shared format for them, no importer anywhere that reads another app's version, and no realistic prospect of one. This is the part of a shutdown that genuinely loses data.

We do not have a Maple account, so we are not going to describe an export screen we have not seen or promise you a button that may not exist. What we can tell you is that Maple's help centre covers connecting calendars, folders, subscriptions and cancelling an account, and we could not find an article in it about exporting your data. Maple's shutdown notice tells families to export or transfer, so check the app itself first and take whatever it gives you.

Then, regardless of what it gives you, do this, because it works whatever the export turns out to produce:

1. Open each list, recipe and meal plan and screenshot it. This feels crude and it is the single most reliable thing in this guide. A screenshot cannot be discontinued.
2. Paste the text into one plain document as well, in a notes app, a Google Doc, or an email to yourself. Text you can paste is worth far more than a picture when you are rebuilding, and having both covers you.
3. Photograph the chore setup, not the history. Who does what, on which days, what it is worth. The point balances are gone. The system in everyone's head is the thing worth keeping.
4. Do it again in late December. Anything you add to Maple between now and then exists only in Maple. One export in September and one final pass in the last week is the whole discipline.

Be selective while you are at it. The lists and recipes that accumulate in a family app over years are mostly dead weight, and a shutdown is a reasonable moment to let the 2024 shopping list go.

The Cosmo watch, which the other guides are not mentioning

If your household ran Maple on a Cosmo JrTrack watch, you are in a harder spot than a straightforward app switch, and none of the migration guides published so far mention it at all.

Maple shipped a watch app through Cosmo's App Station in February 2026, for JrTrack 3, 4 and 5, so schedules and to-dos created by a parent showed up on a child's wrist. For families with a kid too young for a phone, that was often the entire reason for choosing Maple. It was live for under a year.

Here is the honest picture as of today. Cosmo's own Maple setup page has not been updated to say what happens after 31 December. The apps publicly listed for the App Station are things like music and news, and we could not find another family organizer with an app on it. So if the watch is the reason you are here, the app is the easy half of the problem and the watch is the hard half. Ask Cosmo directly what is planned before you commit to a replacement family app, because the family app you pick probably cannot solve it either.

That includes ours. NestBoard has no wearable support of any kind. Not Cosmo, not Apple Watch, not Wear OS. There is nothing on a wrist, and we would rather say that plainly than have you find out in week two. If a kid seeing their own schedule without a phone is non-negotiable in your house, start with what the watch can run and choose the app second.

Why "run both apps for a fortnight" does not work this time

The standard advice for leaving a family app, ours included, is to keep the old one running as a safety net while the new one beds in. We wrote that advice ourselves in our guide to switching off Cozi, and most of it still applies here. One part does not.

With a normal switch, the old app stays put and you can go back for the thing you forgot. Here, the safety net expires on the same night as everything else, and any bridge you build out of a Maple calendar link stops resolving when Maple does. So the order changes:

1. Do the rescue first, not last. Screenshots and exports in the next week or two, while there is no time pressure and nothing is broken.
2. Rebuild the recurring backbone natively in whichever app you pick. School terms, activities, lessons, the standing weekly commitments, birthdays, and anything already booked into next year. In most households that is somewhere between fifteen and forty entries and it takes under an hour.
3. Use the new app as the real one from now, while Maple is still there to check against. That is the overlap, and it is available to you until the end of December rather than for a fortnight of your choosing.
4. Do a final sweep in the last week of December, comparing the new app against Maple for anything booked in 2027.
5. Do not leave it until the 30th. A house that starts this on the 30th is doing it in the middle of the holidays with the kids at home.

Do not migrate history. Last spring's dentist appointment is not worth a keystroke.

Where families are going

There is no single replacement, because Maple was several products at once. The useful question is which part of it your household actually leaned on.

A few newer family apps, Sense, Plannie and Schoolcase among them, have published their own Maple migration pages. They are selling you something, as are we, and they are still worth ten minutes of your time because the feature fit differs a lot between them. Try more than one before the deadline, while you still have Maple open next to it to compare against.

If you want the longer version of the "how do I actually move a household" problem, our Cozi migration guide is the most detailed thing we have written on the mechanics, and what happened when OurHome vanished covers the rebuild when there is no export path at all.

Where NestBoard fits, and where it does not

Since you are on our site, here is the straight version rather than a pitch.

NestBoard is an all-in-one household app: shared calendar, chores with points and allowance, meal planning, grocery and to-do lists, medication reminders, and kid logins that do not need an email address. It runs on a spare tablet as an always-on kitchen board. It costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year for the whole household with unlimited members, and it is free for two weeks with no card.

Three things you should know before you try it, because they bear directly on a Maple migration.

We cannot take an .ics file upload. NestBoard subscribes to a calendar by URL, which you paste into Settings under Calendar Sync, and that covers school calendars, sports feeds and shared Apple or Outlook links. If what Maple hands you is a downloaded file rather than a link, the route is to import that file into Google Calendar or Apple Calendar first, which both accept file uploads, then connect that calendar to NestBoard by signing in. It works, and it is a step we would rather not make you take.

No wearables. Covered above, and it is the main reason NestBoard may simply be wrong for your household.

We are smaller and newer than the names you already know. Which cuts both ways, and given why you are reading this, it is fair to ask what happens if we disappear too. The answer we can offer is the only one that means anything: Settings, then Privacy and Data, gives you a standard .ics file of your calendar and a complete copy of your household data as a JSON file, any day you like, without asking anyone. There is also a subscribable calendar link you can point at Google or Apple so a live copy of your family calendar sits outside NestBoard permanently. Take the export now rather than later is advice that applies to us as much as to Maple.

Frequently asked questions

When exactly does the Maple family app shut down?

31 December 2026. Maple's notice says accounts become inaccessible after that date and all data is deleted with no way to recover it. Annual subscriptions have already stopped renewing and monthly subscriptions run until the shutdown.

Why is Maple shutting down?

Maple's team was acquired by Wander, a travel company, in an announcement made in late July 2026, and the founders joined Wander to work on its platform. The family app is being wound down rather than sold on or handed to a new owner.

Will I lose my Maple calendar?

Partly, and which part depends on where the events came from. Events that arrived through a connection to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Microsoft or TeamSnap already live in those accounts and survive on their own. Events typed straight into Maple exist only in Maple. Open the connected calendar on the web, not through Maple, and anything you can see there is safe.

Can I export my lists, recipes and meal plans from Maple?

Check the app for an export option, and do not rely on it. There is no shared format for lists, recipes, meal plans or chores the way there is for calendars, so no app can import another app's version of them. Screenshot each one and also paste the text into a plain document, then repeat the pass in late December to catch anything added since.

What happens to the Maple app on my child's Cosmo watch?

The Maple watch app was distributed through Cosmo's App Station and depends on Maple's service, so plan on it stopping when Maple does. Cosmo has not published anything about what comes next, and we could not find another family organizer with an app on the App Station. Ask Cosmo directly before you choose a replacement family app, because most family apps have no wearable support at all, NestBoard included.

What is the best Maple alternative for a whole household?

It depends which part of Maple your family actually used. For a shared calendar alone, Cozi or a shared Google Calendar will do it for free. For the full hub of calendar, chores, meals and lists, you are looking at an all-in-one family organizer, and several of them including ours have free trials you can run side by side while Maple is still open. Do that comparison before the deadline rather than after, while you still have the thing you are replacing in front of you.

How long should I leave the move?

Start the rescue now and the rebuild whenever suits, but do not leave either past mid-December. The usual advice of running the old app alongside the new one for a couple of weeks assumes the old app will still be there afterwards, and this time it will not.

Losing an app your household actually ran on is a genuinely annoying thing to have happen, and we would rather this page left you organised than converted. If an all-in-one family board turns out to be the shape of the answer, NestBoard is free for two weeks with no card at mynestboard.com, and you can see what it costs and what it does on pricing and features. If it is not the answer, take the screenshots anyway. December comes quickly.