What you need
- An iPad that can run iPadOS 16.4 or later. That is the 2017 iPad (5th generation) and newer, the iPad mini 5 and newer, the iPad Air 3 and newer, and every iPad Pro.
- A charger it can stay on, and somewhere on the counter or the wall where the family walks past.
- A Gather family. Sign up on gather.guru first; the interview takes about ten minutes and ends with your calendars on the wall.
- A stand is optional. A cookbook stand, a cheap tablet stand, or a strip of adhesive wall mount all work; so does leaning it against the backsplash.
The steps
Check the iPad can update
Open Settings, then General, then Software Update, and install whatever it offers. Gather needs iPadOS 16.4 or later, which is where Safari learned the styles the wall is drawn with.
An iPad that stops at iPadOS 15 or earlier cannot run it. If that is the one in the drawer, the laptop nobody uses or the browser on the TV takes the same steps below, in its own settings.
Settings → General → About shows the model name if you are not sure which iPad it is.
Sign in to Gather on the iPad
Open Safari, go to gather.guru and sign in with your own account. You will see the same home you see on your phone.
If the family is not set up yet, do that first, on whatever screen is handy: the interview takes about ten minutes, and the wall is the first thing it fills.
Set your PIN before you hand the iPad over
Open Settings, then Household Devices, and set your PIN. On the shared screen, parent actions such as settling a job ask for it; kid actions never do.
Do this now, from your own login: once the iPad becomes the household’s device it can no longer act as you, and a PIN is set only from your own login, never on a shared screen.
Make it the household’s device
Still in Settings, under Household Devices, tap “Use this device”, give it a name you will recognize later, such as “Kitchen iPad”, and confirm. The iPad signs out of your account and becomes the family’s screen. It can show the wall and let a kid act as themselves; it cannot act as you.
From your phone you can rename it or take it back out of the family any time, under the same Household Devices.
Enrolling from your phone instead? Household Devices also offers “Add a device”: a code, a QR and a link, good for ten minutes, that you open on the iPad.
Add it to the home screen
In Safari, tap the Share button, then “Add to Home Screen”, then Add. Open Gather from that new icon instead of Safari, and it fills the whole screen with no address bar.
Everything the family does on the counter goes through this one icon.
Keep it awake and plugged in
Open Settings, then Display & Brightness, then Auto-Lock, and choose Never. Leave the iPad on its charger; a screen that is always on wants to be plugged in.
Two settings keep an always-on screen from glaring at midnight, and we recommend turning both on. Both are set from your own login, not on the iPad: open the wall from your calendar (“Open on the wall”) and tap its settings. “Auto-pilot” warms the wall’s tone as the evening comes, and “When nobody’s looking” shows the family’s photos or a painting after a quiet stretch. The iPad picks both up on its own.
Want it locked to Gather so a small kid cannot wander into YouTube? Settings → Accessibility → Guided Access. Triple-click the Home button, or the top button on an iPad without one, to start and stop it.
Put it on the counter
Prop it where the family already gathers: by the coffee maker, on the fridge side of the counter, at the end of the island. The wall is readable across a kitchen; a kid taps it to see their own things.
That is it. Tomorrow morning the week is on the wall, and the iPad that was in a drawer is the piece of the kitchen everyone looks at.
What it does on the counter
- The week on the wall: everyone’s calendars together, the ones pasted in from Google, Apple or Outlook included, and a parent’s work calendar collapsed to one “at work” band so the kids do not see the meetings.
- A pinch zooms from the month to the hour; a flick turns it to the next day. Leave it alone and it drifts back out to the week or the month, whichever you set.
- “Who’s this?” on a tap: a kid picks their face and sees their own jobs and jars; a parent’s face asks for the PIN.
- Jobs started and finished on the counter, settled by a parent, paid into the jars with every dollar as a ledger line.
- Tonight’s dinner from the Kitchen, the weather, and what sounds good for the family to react to.
- When nobody is looking: the photos the family put on the fridge, or a painting, until someone taps.
Wondering how this stacks up against a frame you would buy? Gather vs Skylight Calendar and all four side by side.
Questions parents ask
Which old iPads work as a family wall calendar with Gather?
- An iPad that can update to iPadOS 16.4 or later: the 2017 iPad (5th generation) and newer, the iPad mini 5 and newer, the iPad Air 3 and newer, and every iPad Pro. Settings → General → Software Update tells you where yours stands. An iPad that stops at iPadOS 15 cannot run Gather; the laptop in the drawer or the browser on the TV can, with the same steps in their own settings.
Does the iPad have to stay plugged in?
- Yes. An always-on screen wants a charger. Set Auto-Lock to Never under Display & Brightness and leave it on the cable. Then, from your own login, open the wall and turn on “Auto-pilot”, which warms the wall’s tone as the evening comes, and pick a “When nobody’s looking” scene, which shows the family’s photos or a painting after a quiet stretch, so the screen does not glare at night.
Do my Google, Apple or Outlook calendars show on the iPad?
- Yes. Every calendar you pasted into Gather shows on the household’s screen, refreshing on its own, with the same courtesy the wall gives a shared screen: a calendar you marked busy-only shows as “Busy” with no titles, and a calendar you marked private does not appear on the shared screen at all, whoever is tapping. A parent’s work calendar collapses to one “at work” band for the day. Set each calendar’s visibility under Calendar settings from your own login.
Can the kids mess it up?
- They can do what a kid is allowed to do: tap their own face, see their jobs and jars, start and finish a job, react to what sounds good for dinner. Anything a parent does, settling a job or approving one, asks for your PIN first, and the iPad cannot act as you at all once it is the household’s device. Guided Access, under Settings → Accessibility, locks the iPad to Gather if a small kid likes to wander.
Is this a Skylight Calendar without the frame?
- That is the idea. Skylight sells a frame with its calendar built in, from $149.99 to about $570; Gather puts the same shared calendar, with the chores and dinner beside it, on the iPad you already have, for the price of the plan and nothing else. The honest gap: Skylight writes edits back to Google and Apple and Gather does not yet. The compare page lays the two side by side.
What about an old Android tablet, a Fire tablet or a smart TV?
- The same steps, in that screen’s own settings. Gather opens in a browser, so anything with a current one works: Chrome on an Android tablet, Silk on a Fire tablet, the browser built into a smart TV, the laptop in the drawer, a spare monitor. Add it to the home screen where the screen allows it, turn off its sleep timer, plug it in, and tap “Use this device” under Household Devices.
Will the calendar burn into the screen?
- The iPads this guide covers have LCD screens, which do not burn in the way an OLED can. The wall also does not sit still: it drifts between the week and the month, and with “Auto-pilot” and a “When nobody’s looking” scene turned on it warms as the evening comes and gives way to photos or a painting after a quiet stretch, so no one part of the screen stays lit for hours.