Gmail and your calendar in one native Mac app

On macOS you can have a native Gmail client, or a native calendar, and for years having both has meant running two apps side by side. Hark is one window with both in it — your mail, Google Calendar and Google Tasks, drawn with the platform’s own frameworks rather than a web page in a frame.

What you are actually choosing between

There are four ways to read Gmail on a Mac, and each gives something up. Knowing which thing you mind losing is most of the decision.

Gmail in a browser tab

Complete, free, and always current. It gives up the desktop: no window of its own, no menu bar, and a calendar that is a side panel rather than a place you can work a week in. Everything shares a process with the forty other tabs you have open.

An app that wraps the Gmail website

It looks like an app and gets you a Dock icon and notifications, but what is inside the window is the same web page, carried by a copy of a browser that ships inside the app. You get the desktop’s decoration without the desktop’s behaviour, and the calendar is still the side panel.

A native mail client

Fast, properly Mac-like, and the right answer if mail is all you want. It gives up the calendar entirely — the mail clients in this category do not have one, which is why people who use one also buy a calendar app and end up in two windows anyway.

A native calendar

The mirror image: excellent at the week, with no mail in it. Your invitations arrive somewhere else, which is the part that costs you time.

What one window actually changes

“Both in one app” sounds like tidiness. What it buys is specific, and it is all in the seam between the two halves:

• An invitation is answered where it arrives. The RSVP is inline in the message and writes straight through to your calendar. No second app, no copy-pasting a date, no going back to check whether it took.
• A task becomes a time by dragging it. Google Tasks sits beside the grid; drop one on a day and it is scheduled.
• Checking your week is not a context switch. Mail and calendar are one click apart on the same rail, in the same window, with the same account already signed in.
• The calendar is editable, not a read-only strip. A real week view: create, drag to reschedule, edit a recurring series, show and hide calendars, share one with someone.

Why “native” is doing work here, not decoration

A window that belongs to the Mac has no browser and no bundled copy of one to load before your mail appears. Your labels, threads, attachments and Gmail’s own search operators — from:, has:attachment, is:unread — are the real ones, because it is talking to Gmail rather than re-implementing it. An operator it does not recognise is passed to Google untouched.

It also means your mail stays between your Mac and Google. Hark has no backend for it: nothing is proxied, stored or read by us, and the tokens live in your Keychain. That is the privacy policy, not a slogan.

What it does not do yet

Two things you should know before deciding, because finding them out afterwards is worse:

• One Gmail account per install. The unified inbox across several accounts is built and switched off while the beta is small.
• A small keyboard set. Today it is j, k, the arrow keys and Esc. The layer is going back in one binding at a time, each scoped so it cannot fire while you are typing in a message — the first attempt did, which is why it was pulled.

macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon. Windows is next.

Questions