Google Calendar is one of the most popular calendar services available online. It is extremely useful and versatile. If you have been using this service, then you may want to be aware that support for SMS notifications has ended as of June 27th. This means they will no longer send SMS notifications to your phone of reminders and upcoming events. The only options available will be either reminders by email, pop ups on desktop or smartphone notifications.
It is Google’s stance that SMS notifications are no longer necessary. They believe there are too many other efficient methods to deliver information. In fact, many smart phones and tablets no longer need an Internet connection to receive these alerts.
After the 27th of June, if you are using SMS notifications on your smart phone or tablet you will see pop up notifications. These will only continue to work if you have a calendar app installed on your device. This would include the Google Calendar app or a native calendar app that is tied to Google Calendar. On desktops, this will continue if you have the web version of the Google calendar running inside your browser.
The good news is that these scenarios should cover most people who use smart devices and personal computers. They should be able to continue receiving notifications seamlessly through other delivery methods. Where it gets tricky is for people that do not have smart devices. For these people, the transition will be slightly more complicated.
The best option would be to switch to a smartphone. Its probably time to do so anyways. The alternative is to switch out SMS notifications for email alerts within each individual event. This could be tedious for people with many future events on their calendar.
There is good news for people using Corporate Google accounts and ones used by education and government. These level of accounts will continue to use SMS notifications for their services. However, this will impact people who use personal accounts to build their Google Calendar.