Google has killed location-based reminders 3 times; I still don't know why

20 Aug 2026, 20:00 by Nimrod Aldea · Android Police

I was the mayor of a video game store for most of two years.

Not the owner. Not even an employee. I was the mayor of that store, in the very specific and now mostly forgotten Foursquare sense.

I visited that physical store over and over, day after day, making sure to check in every time I was there so that I could maintain my very fake position as mayor of the video game store.

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I miss this little gem

Posts 3
By Rahul Naskar

The year every app wanted to know where you were standing

Everybody wanted to play mayor

This was 2009, when the concept of a phone knowing exactly where you were was the whole pitch, and when Android was barely out of diapers.

Foursquare kind of took over the world, but Gowalla and SCVNGR were doing the same thing. Google launched Latitude, allowing users to share their physical location with friends and family.

Every one of those apps bet on the same idea: your location was the most interesting fact your phone had ever collected, and it was time something started acting on it instead of just logging it.

However, being the virtual mayor of my local video game store was nice but wasn't useful, and having your mother-in-law know where you are at all times wasn't on anyone's list of preferred features.

So I wasn't shocked to see most of these apps reach early retirement.

But one location-based feature I found extremely useful was also retired early, even though it's still on my preferred features list. And that is Google's location-based reminders.

The reminder that knew me better than my own to-do list

It never judged me about the socks

I don't have a great memory. I forget everything constantly, so I use To-Do lists all the time.

The problem is that I forget to look at the To-Do list, and when I do, all I can do is say "Oh right, I need to buy socks" only to forget about it when I'm out and about.

But there was a time, starting sometime around 2012 or 2013, when I could say "Hey Google, set a reminder."

A little menu would pop up with a few options for when it should go off, and one of them was a small GPS icon. Tap it, tell it where, and that was the whole setup: "If I walk past the place that sells socks, tell me I need socks."

I had no idea what any of this was actually called, and I don't think I ever once wondered. It was just what happened when I asked.

I could be walking down the street and suddenly get a reminder to buy that one specific thing at that one specific store that I just happened to walk by.

"Past me" would notice we were running low on eggs and leave a reminder for "future me" to buy eggs as he was walking past the grocery store.

This also worked when coming back home. I would set myself reminders to take the laundry out of the machine when I arrived home, because I remembered I'd forgotten to do that when I was halfway across town.

It's a genuinely small thing. It's also one of the only features a phone has ever had that actually understood how my brain works.

Instead of saying "your reminders are safe in your pocket," it placed my reminders out in the world, where they could be useful.

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Posts By Timi Cantisano

Then one day, it just said no

Rude, honestly

I used that feature constantly for a decade, and then one day in 2022, Google killed it. Without notice. I woke up in the morning, asked my phone to set a reminder when I go to the store, and the phone just said, "No."

I went looking for a reason. All I found were other people like me, poking their heads out of their phones and asking the same question into the void.

It turned out Google had said something, just not anywhere anyone was likely to see it: one quiet line added to a support page, "The option to create reminders for a certain location is going away soon."

No explanation. No apology. Just gone.

I kept digging, and that's when the autopsy came together. Whatever I'd been talking to back in 2012, it had never had its own version of this feature.

That was always Google Keep, a completely separate note-taking app, quietly doing the work in the background since 2013 without me opening it on purpose.

In 2018, my assistant got its own version of the same trick built into it, and I imagine I kept using it without noticing anything had changed underneath me.

But that was the version that died in 2022. Keep's original one had been sitting there the entire time, untouched, unbothered, still working.

So I started asking Keep instead. Problem solved. Until October 2025, when Google decided to fold Keep's reminders into Google Tasks, minus the location reminder feature. The feature was now finally, truly dead.

In September 2026, just a few weeks away, Google is going to kill Google Assistant and replace it with the ultra-smart and ultra-capable Gemini.

The Gemini assistant can book you a vacation, live translate almost any language, and manage your entire life from one chat window.

It can't do location-based reminders. I have no idea why.

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Posts 2
By Sumukh Rao

So I'm building my own version of it instead

Fine, I'll do it myself

I don't have to rely on Google to answer all my location-based reminder wishes. Plenty of other Android apps can do exactly that.

These days, I can build it myself. Twenty-five years of reviewing gadgets has taught me that the ones I keep do the job and then leave me alone, and I already have my own custom assistant app running on my phone.

It occurred to me about four paragraphs ago that giving it a GPS icon is not exactly cutting-edge engineering.

For a tiny feature that not many people used, it had quite a history, and I suspect it will stay with me in one shape or another for many more years.

If no one is going to build it for me, I'll build it myself. And when it's running, I intend to reclaim my rightful title as mayor. This time, probably at the donut shop next to my kid's school. Don't judge me.