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Since I got the new phone Google Calendar app on it had been abysmal at making notifications it is supposed to. Most of the time they just never happen or happen late at the wrong time.

Sometimes opening the app triggers some overdue notification from an hour ago.

As far as I can tell Calendar is the only app that has any issue with notifications, all notifications from all other apps work perfectly.

Is there anything I can try to do to knock some sense into it?

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  • Use a different calendar app then? There are tons of them (link goes to my list). – Izzy♦ Nov 15 '17 at 11:38
  • Well, I have everything in web version of Google Calendar so that sort of works for me... I imagine other calendars can sync with it, but not to keen to sink time in research and testing. Basically all I want is reliable notifications in this app. :) – Rarst Nov 15 '17 at 11:52
  • Are you speaking of the web version of Google Calendar – or of the Android app? In the latter case: it's not the app that stores the calendar data – that is done by the "calendar provider". So regardless which calendar app you use, it has access to the very same data (with very few exceptions which explicitly use their own storage). – Izzy♦ Nov 15 '17 at 11:58
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    In any case I'd like to focus question on how to fix notifications if possible. I am aware I could try another app altogether. – Rarst Nov 15 '17 at 13:03
  • Are you using greenfiy, or any aggressive dozing? android OS can put calendar into deep hibernate, preventing notifications. – WillW Nov 15 '17 at 15:13
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I have developed android app which gives persistent ringing reminders for calendar events. The reminders will keep ringing until explicitly dismissed. App name : CalRinger - Persistent ringing reminders for Google Calendar events

As opposed to default alert notifications which are prone to be missed as they just disappear after a short while.

The app creates a reminder for each calendar event & a complete peace of mind is guaranteed with no cases of reminders not firing or firing late.

I am sure it will be game changer for those users who rely heavily on Google calendar events for day to day life.

Playstore link : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobitronix.gauravchauhan.reminder_calendar_events.pro

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1) Double check: Settings > Apps > All > then to Calendar "show notifications" is checked and then Google Contacts "show notifications" is checked also.

2) Make sure your calendar is not an external calendar. Other Calendar

reference:

https://forums.androidcentral.com/android-5-0-lollipop/522084-getting-no-notifications-google-calendar-app.html

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  • Double checked, all enabled everywhere. :\ Definitely my main calendar too. – Rarst Nov 15 '17 at 16:07
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EDIT: before trying the solution below, first try disabling battery optimization for Calendar.

Note that the following is only my experience and opinion based on limited observations.

History of events

I've seen this happen after upgrading to a new 5.8.x release. The last (mostly) reliable version I'm aware of is 5.8.38-200532405-release. After I noticed the missed notifications on the upgraded version, I downgraded (using my backed up apk).

I didn't upgrade for a while, and during that time, at least one new version was released; I decided to give it another chance. This upgrade took me to 6.0.x. It sort of worked ok for a while - notifications were sometimes late by a minute or two, but that was acceptable to me.

Then a couple days later, I was doing some intensive work on my phone, with a lot of apps open at the same time. Calendar was starting to get flaky and not trigger notifications, or only trigger sporadically.

My theory

Newer app releases are possibly taking more memory than before - or not as robust at restarting the background service when the OS kills it due to low memory conditions. The more memory in use by apps, the more likely any particular service will be killed (not necessarily Calendar's, but a memory-bloated service or app will make the problem worse).

I'm not at all familiar with Android development, but ideally Calendar would keep a list of the recent notifications (maybe in the last hour?) that have successfully triggered. Then if the service is killed and gets restarted, it should compare recent notifications that should've triggered with its list of those that actually did trigger. It should then trigger the ones that were missed and add them to the already-triggered list. I have a feeling the app is not doing this.

Suggestions

Avoid having too many apps running. Swipe away those you're not using.

Failing that, try downgrading Calendar. You can try APK Mirror (use at your own risk!). Out of curiosity, I downloaded 5.8.38-200532405-release onto my desktop and compared it to my own backup. The apk file wasn't the same (because it's a zip file with possibly different compression ratio & file modification times, etc), but the unzipped contents were identical (compared using diff -r). The sha256 of the APK Mirror apk is 30340b7e95e5e71f8183cc53af376efd27b10e11d75e8dd4b957b03a45c3dedf.

Caveats

The last reliable version (mentioned above) for my device and usage patterns may not be the same one that works for you. I said "mostly" reliable because once in a long while I still miss notifications. Keeping the list of running apps small seems to help.

Miscellany

I used information from answers here to backup my device's apks.

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