In a surprise move Google has announced they’ll be removing SMS notifications from Calendar in January.
In a blog post, Google has said that as of January 7th next year (2019), you’ll no longer be able to select SMS notification as an option when creating a new calendar entry. Google offers a range of alternative notification options for calendar events, and has moved to replace SMS notifications with in-app and email notifications describing them as:
- As event notifications in a web browser that has Calendar open or a mobile device if you have the Google Calendar app for Android or iOS.
- In an email if you had set up SMS notifications for new events, changed events, canceled events, or event responses.
Google has been making more changes to the Calendar API to support these changes with developers able to integrate the chances into their websites or mobile apps by checking out the changes on the Google Developers page.
If you’re still living with a feature phone and relying on SMS notifications this will be a shock, maybe check out some of the great new smartphones available.
I’m actually ticked off about this change. For corporate email, I have used it to get reminders on my phone as I don’t have a company phone. And I could get it on my phone but would have to have a special security app where they would have access to everything on my personal phone. Maybe they will add external email to get notifications.
This has been my primary reminder of all things on my calendar. I don’t want app notifications. I want a text message like I have had for years. Very disappointing.
Probably about time they removed it. I’ve used Calendar for many years, and it has always defaulted to SMS as the reminder action, and I’ve never known it to actually work in Australia.