Google seems to be removing two features from its wizard’s reminder configuration capabilities. He is abandoning support for assignable reminders: “remind Anna to take the trash this morning” and location-based reminders: “remind me to call Becca when she gets to the office”. Google did not announce any changes, but chose to bury one on a help page and another in a wizard pop-up window. Both functions still work, but they obviously won’t work for a long time.
Add this to the latest in a long, long history of Google doing a terrible job of turning reminders into a useful system even remotely.
Google’s long list of chaotic product offerings is long, but I don’t think it makes much less sense than reminders. You can set reminders in Google Calendar, which are synchronized with the Google Tasks application. This is good and correct behavior! But you can also set up reminders with Google Assistant, which live in a completely different ecosystem and don’t appear in Tasks. Google Keep is perhaps the most chaotic: you can add a reminder to a note and it will be displayed along with the reminders created by the wizard, but not in Google Tasks. They will also appear in a dedicated section of the Keep app, but none of the other reminders.
There’s just one place to see all the reminders in your Google Account: Google Calendar for iOS and Android Google Calendar shows how it should work. But he doesn’t. Image: Google
There’s just one place to see all the reminders in your Google Account, and it’s the Google Calendar app for iOS and Android. But even this has its peculiarities. You can create a reminder in the Google Calendar application, which appears next to the wizard reminders and in reminders.google.com, or you can create a task that appears exactly the same but appears in Google Tasks but not elsewhere. . In the Calendar web application, you can only create and view Tasks reminders, which are not shown where other reminders do.
The fact that Calendar brings it so close to the right is even more exasperating. This means that there’s nothing to keep the reminders separate, except that Google doesn’t put them together. In general, all you can really expect is that your device will ping you at the right time and that you never need to look at a list of everything you’re going through.
Within this meaningless ecosystem, Google can’t even match its reminder features. The wizard may be losing location-based reminders, but Keep reminders can still be activated with the GPS PIN. Google Tasks and Calendar reminders may never be location-based, for some reason.
A half-full reading of recent changes to Google would be the first sign that Google reminds people that reminders exist. And as the company continues to work to bring its products together more consistently, a project may be underway to finally make sense of reminders: last year 9to5Google detected a new feature called ” Memory “could be the ultimate home for all of you. markers and reminders.
Maybe this is the beginning of a renewed care of reminders! But probably not
But I wouldn’t hold your breath. Google has intermittently expressed interest in making reminders work, most recently in 2018, when it relaunched Google Tasks along with a major redesign of Gmail. The app seemed like a good start, but it was clear that Google had more work to do. Over the next four years, Google has done little of this work.
It is clear that Google sees Assistant as the true center of its ecosystem, both for reminders and for its entire environmental computing project. Which would be nice if the company actually did the (relatively minor) job of connecting the rest of the ecosystem.
Here, we expect Google to reduce its reminder features as a way to put the whole system together and then add some of those features. Until then, I will continue to set reminders with Siri. Maybe he listens to me badly half the time, but at least I know where to find things.