Google Calendar on Android may finally let you set up custom birthday reminders

The Google Calendar app is a great way to remember the birthdays of all your friends and family. However, it only notifies you the day of the birthday, which isn’t ideal if you want to prepare for the day by purchasing a gift or throwing an event. But it looks like Google Calendar could become more helpful in that respect in the near future.

In the development version of Google Calendar, a user who goes by @AssembleDebug on Twitter discovered a new feature hiding in the app. By changing a few flags in the 2023.08.2-511758217 version of the app, you can trigger new UI elements that allow you to quickly add new birthdays and create custom notifications.

The ability to add birthdays and anniversaries has been available on the Android Google Calendar app for a long time. However, this feature would mark the first time the app allowed users to set and customize reminders.

The way it works is the app would open up a popup asking if you want to add a birthday or not. If you select “Not now,” the prompt will hide below the app bar. When you want to add a birthday, it will bring up a card where you can insert information and add a notification of your choosing. In addition to the images, @AssembleDebug also included a video showing how it all works.

While it would be nice to have this feature tacked on to the current experience, don’t get your hopes up too high. It’s possible that this feature may never get a public release. Whether it does or doesn’t will all depend on what Google decides to do with it.