29/03/2024

Fabrikant Tech

Tech Specialists

Google Calendar will be losing support for location-based reminders

Google Calendar will be losing support for location-based reminders

Some new strings within also reveal the lack of Google Keep integration

There’s no shortage of options if you wish to set a reminder on your Android phone. In fact, you could argue that there are a little too many — Google Keep, Tasks, and Assistant Reminders currently all allow you to set one in their own unique ways, which can get a bit confusing. Last month we saw evidence suggesting that Google’s been working on cleaning some of that up, starting with the replacement of Assistant Reminders with Tasks in Google Calendar. An APK teardown of a recent app update is now revealing some more details about these upcoming changes.

Google Calendar v2022.26.x includes some new text strings that seem to reference the transition of Reminders to Tasks, as pieced together by 9to5Google. A migration card with the text “Soon your reminders will be upgraded to tasks” sure makes it sound like this move is going to be mandatory.

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Calendar does support Tasks right now, but once these changes go live, it will be the only you’ll have there for staying on top of due dates and notifications. Reminders will be done away with and a little magic button will help you ease into that transition, turning them into tasks immediately:

<string name=”reminders_migration_card_button”> Turn my reminders into tasks now </string>

Sadly, though, other strings begin to reveal some of the little downside to making that switch:

”If a reminder has a location, it will appear in the task’s description. You will not receive any location-based notification from it.”

Google Tasks currently does not support location-based reminders, so any locations you’ve attached will simply be turned into text descriptions that’ll be displayed under their corresponding tasks following migration.

Finally, Google Keep should be retaining reminders as they were, with the new strings also revealing that no option to turn them into tasks will be introduced. This makes sense considering reminders on that app are a little more sophisticated than what Tasks offers — that doesn’t support images, for one. Of course, the lack of Tasks on Google Keep also means that reminders will continue to lack Google Calendar integration, so it will be interesting to see how Google ultimately approaches this.