How to control the color of your OmniFocus Reminder calendar on the iPhone

If you use OmniFocus and its wonderful iPhone companion app, OmniFocus for iPhone, you may have run into the same frustration as me. For some reason, Apple has not included a way to control the colors that it assigns to calendars on the iPhone.

Since red is the first color the iPhone assigns to a calendar of any given type, this means that by default my work calendar is colored red, and my OmniFocus reminders are as well. I already use red, blue, green, and orange for various calendars, and since purple is available and is the color of OmniFocus’s icon, I would really like my OmniFocus reminder calendar to be purple on my phone.

There’s a way to do it, but it’s very much a hack. Here are the steps:

1. If you already have a reminder calendar for OmniFocus, delete it by going into the Settings app on your phone, then to Mail, Contacts, Calendars, tap on the OmniFocus Reminders calendar, and tap Delete Account at the bottom.
2. Now in the OmniFocus for iPhone app, tap the Info button at the bottom right, then Calendar Export, then switch off the Due Soon Export setting at the top. To get the OmniFocus Reminders calendar to be a specific color, you need to subscribe to other calendars until you know that the color you want is next in line.
3. Find any iCal URL that you can subscribe to (it doesn’t matter what, you’re going to delete it anyway), and subscribe to that calendar by going to the Settings app > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and choosing Add Account > Other > Add Subscribed Calendar and typing (or ideally, pasting) the URL in.
4. Once you’ve saved this new calendar, exit the Settings app by pressing the Home button and open the Calendar app. Tap the Calendars button at the top left, and watch in the Subscribed section for your new calendar to show up.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you see the new calendar show up in the color that you want your OmniFocus Reminders calendar to be. You can use the same URL to subscribe to as many times as is necessary, but change the Description field so you can tell the calendars apart.
6. Delete the last one added (the one that is the color you want) by following the steps in Step 1.
7. In OmniFocus for iPhone, tap the Info button at the bottom right > Calendar Export > switch Due Soon Export to On.
8. Tap Synchronize Now. Once it completes, tap Synchronize Now again, at which point it will ask for your username and password for your sync folder. Once you give them, it will ask if you want to subscribe to the Omnifocus Reminders calendar. Choose Subscribe, and once it successfully subscribes it will ask if you want to view the new calendar. It is very important that you choose View Calendar.
9. Once the Calendar app opens, tap the Calendars button at the top right and watch to make sure your new OmniFocus Reminders calendar shows up under Subscribed with the right color. If you don’t do this step, it may end up with the wrong color.
10. Once you’ve confirmed that the OmniFocus Reminders calendar is the right color, you can go into the Mail, Contacts, Calendars in the iPhone’s Settings app and delete the extra calendars you subscribed to. Your OmniFocus Reminders calendar will keep its color.

Obviously this is very convoluted and a hack, but it definitely works. Good luck!