Monday, July 11, 2016

Snoozing Reminders will finally return with Google Calendar v5.5.9

Many people use and rely on Google Calendar to help organize their life. However, there are many things that we want to vaguely keep track of but that aren’t really well-suited to be marked on a calendar.

Weekly reminders, goals, or minor tasks that need to be done are better handled separately from your main calendar, which is why Google Calendar added tasks and reminders to accommodate more use-cases. Fans of Google Calendar’s reminder feature probably noticed that you used to be able to snooze reminder notifications.

Unfortunately, for some reason the feature seemed to have disappeared when Google Calendar was bumped up to version 5.0. We’re not sure exactly why the feature wasn’t made available when Calendar received its complete Material Design make-over, but we were hoping that eventually it would return in a future release. Today, Google Calendar v5.5.9 is rolling out and a teardown of the APK file strongly hints at the return of the reminder snoozing feature.

Disclaimer: The evidence we dig up from the APK files of an app are not definitive. Google may choose to pull these features without any indication in a future release.


Eh, I’ll do it Later

Within the APK file, we’ve found strings and the actual code that will be used to implement the feature (meaning, it’s not just there to prepare for a future release, but rather should already be fully functioning) that were not present in prior versions of the Google Calendar app. The below strings clearly point towards the return of the feature, but it doesn’t seem like snoozing will function exactly the same as it used to before Google Calendar v5.0.

<string name="task_snooze_failed_message">Failed to snooze the reminder</string>
<string name="task_snooze_label">Snooze</string>
<string name="task_snooze_message" formatted="false">Reminder snoozed for <g example="Today" id="date">%s</g>, <g example="11:20am" id="time">%s</g></string>
<string name="task_snooze_next_week">Next week</string>
<string name="task_snooze_short">In 10 minutes</string>
<string name="task_snooze_this_week">Later this week</string>
<string name="task_snooze_title">Snooze to…</string>
<string name="task_snooze_today">Later today</string>
<string name="task_snooze_tomorrow">Tomorrow</string>
<string name="task_snooze_weekend">This weekend</string>

Indeed, if you notice within these strings there are indications that you will be able to select from multiple times until which the notification will be snoozed. Previously, you were only able to snooze the notifications for a default time of 15 minutes (which was not adjustable, unfortunately). The feature will not only be making a return, but we believe it will be improved upon.

Furthermore, the reason we believe the feature will be coming sooner rather than later is due to the existence of classes and methods found within the decompiled APK such as SnoozeActivity.smali and especially SnoozeFindTimeAsyncTask.smali which both directly indicate the ability to manually select a time until which to snooze your notification.

Unfortunately, though, the returning snooze capability in Calendar doesn’t seem to be as robust as the snooze feature in Google’s Inbox which allows you to select a particular location until which the reminder is snoozed. Nevertheless, for those of us who still prefer using Gmail + Google Calendar over Google Inbox, this update is definitely welcome.


Google Calendar v5.5.9 can be downloaded at APKMirror.

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