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Google Calendar Ends SMS Notifications
LuserOnFire writes: Google has sent out an email this morning that says in part: "Starting on June 27th, 2015, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will no longer be sent. SMS notifications launched before smartphones were available. Now, in a world with smartphones and notifications, you can get richer, more reliable experience on your mobile device, even offline." You can find the announcement on Google's support pages as well. "Richer" may be accurate, but I'm not sure that "more reliable" describes web-based notifications; that may be why the announcement linked does not apply for Google's "Work, Education and Government customers."
Google Calendar runs from the web. Where you think those SMS get sent from?
What if I choose/can't afford to own a simpler 'dumb' phone?
"Mobile notifications" both never work for me and deliver exactly the same information. Furthermore, my smartphone is a far frailer device that I do not feel comfortable taking half way around the world with me, where's a Nokia 3310 is a very durable and reliable phone (I speak from experience on this matter). Trendy for Google to cripple their services I suppose...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Smartphone based notifications are not web based. The idea is that your device runs a calendar app and syncs with Google Calendar. You then get notifications regardless if you are online or outside a coverage area, hence more reliable than notifications which only work via sms.
I find it really ironic that Google, a company so used to being the new hotness upstart company, is so willfully ignoring usage patterns of a significant minority comprising "the youth" and people on the wrong side of the internet divide, and much of the third world, and anyone without a data plan outside of wifi range.
What these people have in common is they use sms or some form of text-like DM instead of email, so email notifications sit in an unread inbox and are effectively useless. Syncing calendars is fine as long as each individual maintains their own calendar, but sms is one of the nice ways to notify individual attendees without some major calendar confab.
For example, my kid's french tutor uses Google calendar for scheduling, and if you load the calendar it shows *every* person scheduled on that calendar, which is great for finding available spots, but it's not something you would leave visible. Turn it off/non-visible, and you lose web notifications. However, at present each person gets an sms notification for their appointment, even if they turn the calendar off. Sooo.... Google expects every person on a shared calendar to leave that calendar active at all times in order to receive web or email notifications, which are likely ignored if not disabled?
It's a tone-deaf move. Personally, I use sms to ensure my kids get the notification no matter what, and this downgrade will result in all sorts of ignored events and missed appointments. One workaround, at least for t-mobile, is to email the notification to 800YOURNUM@tmomail.net ....tho there was some talk of the service being taken down to avoid abuse.
I think not...(*poof*)
1. Google couldn't figure out a way to scrape enough user data from SMS notifications, and
2. Google is about as relevant today as leisure suits are fashionable.
no attention paid.
Most of the kids these days have smartphones of some sort, either Android or iPhone. If they use Google Calendar at all, they almost certainly also have a calendar app that would handle the notification. So why would they even need SMS? I'd even bet they don't use SMS for talking to their friends, they probably use one or another messaging or social-media app.
And app-based notifications have one advantage: since the app has the calendar data cached locally, it can generate notifications even when the phone can't get a signal or network connection.
Waaaaaa! Call me a WAMBULANCE!
Google is shuttering a FREE service that has mostly been eclipsed by better technology!
Listen, Luddites, Google has no obligation to provide you with squat, unless you are paying them.
Move on.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Odds on the reason the WEG side retains SMS is the G portion. The government's a huge bureaucracy with a lot of inertia, and there's probably tons of places in their rules and procedures where SMS is specifically required (it may not be the sole option, but it has to be an available option). A lot of the time it makes sense: many government employees (think emergency services) have pagers because they can pick up a basic alert signal in situations where they can't get a usable data signal (all they have to do is detect carrier-present, they don't have to be able to decode data from it), and since most of those pagers can also receive SMS it's simple to piggyback text messages on top of the required pager without making the employee carry a second device.
I must be one of the few people who have a 2G flip phone for T-mobile. It is so old that it cannot roam onto a partner's 850 MHz network. Anyways, I receive short message service on my phone. I wonder if my phone truncates text messages from smartphones after 160 characters or so.
On a side not, I have not subscribed to any text base alert system.
So, basically the non-profitable ones they can't sell ads to?
Because, let's be honest here, Google makes the new hotness to sell ads. That it is useful "new hotness" is just the way they lure you in.
Google isn't providing a public service. Google is padding their ad revenue. And all those "free" services exist for two reason: analytics and ads.
Beyond that, you can bet your ass google doesn't give a crap about you. Not even a little. And they never will.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I find it really ironic that Google, a company so used to being the new hotness upstart company, is so willfully ignoring usage patterns of a significant minority comprising "the youth" and people on the wrong side of the internet divide, and much of the third world, and anyone without a data plan outside of wifi range.
I'm sure Google is very aware of the usage patterns as they track everything they do. As for ignoring the wrong side of the Internet device and much of the third world, that isn't their business, they are an Internet business and almost everything they do is based on that. If you don't have access to the Internet, most of their stuff doesn't work.
As for a calendar entry, unless it is brand new, you will have sync'd the calendar entry and unless you CHOSE to silence the scheduled time alert, you will still get alerted even if you have no WiFi or Internet access. There are also a lot more options to dealing with a calendar entry than a simple SMS message. You can control how soon you get notified, repeat notifications, options on how to get notifications etc..
SMS, is just text message you can stop unless you want to black list the number and you can't choose when or how much time in advance you want that notification.
As for your kid's french tutor, sounds like they need someone to help them make a better process. A calendar entry for your kid's scheduled appointment, shouldn't include other peoples schedules in it.
I really admire their marketing genius. I really do. They started out with the inclusion of the phrase, "Don't be evil." That phrase, from their inception, was nothing more than a marketing ploy, a gimmick, and so many folks (including hopeful people from the FOSS community, I mean even the hard edge freedom fighters from OS communities) tried so hard to love and promote Google.
The cold, hard, reality is that the not being evil bit was (and is) a market strategy that had a massive effect. Coupled with their propensity to keep everything in the perpetual state of beta-class they cut off services frequent enough so that people notice and get hurt by it. They track and market that info. They market to you based on that information in the form of ads (if you have them enabled) and there are still many who see no wrong in this.
I, personally, use GMail and YouTube. I sacrifice my privacy to make use of their services though I have the tracking disabled as much as I can and I do not see their ads. I recommend others do the same.
Are they less evil than other companies? Nope. They are more evil than some. It is in the business they do, by default, and they can not (or will not) avoid being evil. In fact, being evil is so ingrained you could say that it is their business model and that they would have not succeeded or gone bankrupt without it.
I am surprised that they do not put their own ads on their scraped/cached content and serve those up as the default links. No, really, I am surprised that they have not tried that. I, too, tried to support them at the start. I tried to believe that they would do their best to avoid being evil as much as possible. Then they got big... The rest is, shall we say, history.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Some of us have gone away from the smart phones. Mainly because we don't need to be connected 24 hours aday. I went away from a smart phone 2 years ago so I can leave my work behind on some road trips with my wife. If someone needs to connect me during those time, they can call or text me. And yes I have gotten texts from my boss asking some questions when I was away from the office and in another country.
After the "new" photo web storage service that are awful . Doesn't upload picture and upload "noise" picture... these announcement make them ending difinitly their moto "Don't be evil"
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
"I want anybody who provides me services legally obligated to do what they say they will, thank you very much."
No one, at least in the country of the United States, has an obligation to do as they say they will on an advertisement. This is what the "fine print" and terms of service are for.
Just about every terms of service I've read, Apple, Google, Motorola, you name it, include somewhere within the legalese something along the lines of, "We reserve the right to modify or cancel service at any time without prior notice."
This is fully legal and completely within bounds of the US justice system. Your incompetence and/or laziness will nip you in the bud if you rely on a service which has been largely made obsolete. Even a feature phone (aka dumbphone) has a simple calendar application or alarm clock that can allow someone to keep a schedule. I even recall when I used Sony Ericsson feature phones prior to 2007, I found a program on the web that synced my calendar on my Mac to the one in my Sony Ericsson feature phone.
I admit that this sort of syncing would likely be beyond the knowledge and reach of those in developing countries, but still... The apps were there and have been there for years.
Well that "do no evil" in the corporate charter means that unlike many other companies, they do actually have a choice not to do evil.Not that they seem to have been using that choice often.
I am going to start a new company, have it go public, and put "Hookers and Blow"in the charter and see if I can make it stick.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
...and Google taketh away. Been here, done this, several times. Not surprising.
It's you that's out of touch. Kids don't use SMS like they used to, it's all about apps like Snapchat now. And most kids don't generally care about calendar reminders either.
As for people without data plans, Google are inventing record-breaking new technologies like Loon precisely to reach these people. They are about as far away from ignoring the problem as you can possibly get.
Nope, SMS doesn't achieve that, it needs a signal at the point at which the notification is received. Whereas an app that generates local notifications only needs to sync the event once. The app-based method is much more reliable.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
For example, my kid's french tutor uses Google calendar for scheduling, and if you load the calendar it shows *every* person scheduled on that calendar, which is great for finding available spots, but it's not something you would leave visible. Turn it off/non-visible, and you lose web notifications....
Tell them to look at mindbodyonline.com instead.
It looks like the age where you can use SMS instead of apps is coming to a close.
Five years ago, most of what I did with a smartphone was possible with SMS. I could call a cab, order a pizza, look up arrival times at a bus stop, tweet, and check in on Foursquare.
They're doing it with maps too, for example. And every jquery-using website has noticeably slowed down for me in the past couple of weeks. Apparently google "updated" something there too. Oh, and they deliberately broke search-by-image because they don't like my browser -- it used to work fine with the exact same set-up, but a while back simply stopped functioning.
I think that google is failing at this "don't be evil" stuff. Instead they're shooting to be the next redmond.
You could configure Google calendar to act like a Website monitoring service, where it would send you a SMS every time a website was down.
What's got project Loon to do with data plans in developed areas?
Data plans are small or expensive because the spectrum is finite and there's no real way around it.
So, on a cheap plan you may have a lot of voice, unlitimited SMS and say 300MB of data transfer per month.
If that calendar is a shared one and you need to sync the calendar but don't do all day long because internet access is unavailable, then it won't get synced.
Not everyone uses a smart phone. I'm in my thirties and a software engineer and I have a sub-$50 USD flip-phone. It makes calls. Has voicemail. And does SMS. There is literally nothing else I could probably want or need it to do. I will move on from Google services before I'll waste money on expensive smart phones and data plans to... do what I can already do for a 1/4-cent SMS message.
1) Someone will always comment on their continued use and the superiority of an essentially obsolete Nokia handset, whether it is an older feature phone or an N900.
2) A pissing match will take place between otherwise zealous technology advocates as to how little they pay for mobile service, often coupled with how little value they find in mobile data or contemporary smartphones.
This might seem like a novel concept but you could add the appointment with the French tutor to your child's calendar. You know, set up the appointment on one account and invite the teacher as an attendee. Then it shows up on the teacher's calendar AND on your child's. Then you can sync the child's calendar and only have to see their appointments. In fact, this is how these appointment systems are supposed to work.
Starting on June 27th, 2015, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will no longer be sent. SMS notifications helped to keep you alerted after smartphones allowed notifications from every app possible. Now, in a world lost in notifications, you will not be able to find the calendar notification, more like every notification from Facebook and Twitter of your friends posting pictures of cats!
I suspect your VC rounds will either go really poorly...or really well.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Most of the kids these days.......
How much is it costing google to run the SMS service? The company used to do useful stuff, now they just endlessly kill off their services and re-skin stuff to make it harder to use (gmail)
Run the damn SMS service for another decade until it's well and truly not needed, then end it and get ire from no one.
You dumb asses, Google.
I use a Nexus 5 but I don't have a data plan since I'm near WiFi most of the time (plus I don't feel spending $30+ just to get a data plan). However, I loved having the capability to get SMS whenever an event was added to my Google Calendar (by other family member, for example).
So, Google could have justified this move by saying that sending free SMS is costing us an arm and a leg, and this is a cost-cutting maneuver. Instead, they are hiding behind "oh everyone has a smartphone these days".
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