Sep 5, 2019
Alerts/Notifications not syncing between Google Calendar and Mac Calendar
The issue is that when I create events in my Mac's Calendar and set an alert (ie. 1 hour before meeting starts), the alert isn't synced with my Google Calendar and vice-versa.
Alert/Notification syncing used to work some months ago but stopped working for some unknown reason. It's terribly frustrating because I'm not being notified of meetings/events as they are approaching.
I set up a brand new gmail account, synced it to my Mac and tested the same process and it indeed doesn't work with that account either.
I'm a GSuite customer and attempted contacting 'support' who were absolutely useless. They wasted my time for 2 hours (asking me to wait 2-3 minutes when in reality it was 15-20 minutes while nothing happened) and when I enquired about escalating the issue as a fault the 'support' 'engineer' said he couldn't log a fault.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Details
Informational notification.
This question is locked and replying has been disabled.
Community content may not be verified or up-to-date. Learn more.
All Replies (15)
Sep 18, 2019
Google user
Nov 26, 2019
Dec 2, 2019
My terrible workaround is to only create events in Google Calendar, and then the notifications seem to sync. But any that I create on the Mac Calendar, the alerts don't go through to Apple.
Last edited Dec 2, 2019
Feb 21, 2020
This is a serious issue and I am seeing the same issue since the past 3-4 weeks. I just realized this was not happening when I missed an important meeting yesterday. I am on latest Mojave on a MacBook Pro and I see that the event shows up on my phone device and on Google Cal but the reminder portion is missing there. I can clearly see the reminder on the Mac :-(.
FYI - I just tested by creating an event on Google Cal with a 10-min reminder and that showed up fine on my phone and on Mac. It's only when I create an event on Mac that it is not showing up on Google Cal and hence it won't show up on phone. Any suggestions will be extremely helpful! Thanks.
HELP PLEASE!!
Last edited Feb 21, 2020
Mar 23, 2020
Mar 30, 2020
I understand that alerts/notifications are not syncing between Google Calendar and Mac Calendar . We’re currently on a high case season, so we’re doing everything possible to contact all of our customers. I’m sorry for the long delay and thank you for your patience.
Thank you for sharing this URL https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/13679079 to understand the issue you're having, there was an investigation with our Engineering and Product Development Team about this specific issue and I have consulted with them about your recent request too.
How to reproduce the issue:
- Add a Google Calendar/CalDAV account to MacOS.
- Open Apple's native calendar app (formerly called iCal)-
- Create an event in Apple Calendar on MacOS and add an alert/reminder/notification (e.g. 5 minutes before event)
- Go to Google Calendar's web interface, the event appears but no notification/alert is set.
The final insights and resolution form our Engineering and Product Development Team are that Google Calendar CalDav implementation supports alarms/notifications (VALARM), but it doesn't support the value AUDIO for the ACTION attribute, which Apple uses to send alerts/notifications about events. Google Calendar supports DISPLAY and EMAIL values only, this is because Google Calendar only have display and email options when setting up an event notification.
Since Google Calendar doesn't strip the VALARM ACTION:AUDIO, other calendar client devices syncing with Google Calendar will still have the VALARM ACTION:AUDIO. In the case of the iOS calendar, presumably they work with VALARM ACTION:AUDIO just like the MacOS client, so the alerts will work on iOS just fine...just not within the Google Calendar web interface or on android.
Google Calendar and our syncing tools allow you to synchronize your events, however, alerts and notifications are cosmetic features included in the products, since Google Calendar and Mac Calendar are two completely different products (internally) they don't use the same language for specific features. This is something that has been escalated to both Product Teams, Google and Apple, currently there is no estimated time to know if this is going to be fix by both products to integrate the same internal language for alerts and notifications. We encourage you to keep using Google Products, and for your iOS devices, to download the Google Calendar app from your Apple Store.
How to reproduce the issue:
- Add a Google Calendar/CalDAV account to MacOS.
- Open Apple's native calendar app (formerly called iCal)-
- Create an event in Apple Calendar on MacOS and add an alert/reminder/notification (e.g. 5 minutes before event)
- Go to Google Calendar's web interface, the event appears but no notification/alert is set.
The final insights and resolution form our Engineering and Product Development Team are that Google Calendar CalDav implementation supports alarms/notifications (VALARM), but it doesn't support the value AUDIO for the ACTION attribute, which Apple uses to send alerts/notifications about events. Google Calendar supports DISPLAY and EMAIL values only, this is because Google Calendar only have display and email options when setting up an event notification.
Since Google Calendar doesn't strip the VALARM ACTION:AUDIO, other calendar client devices syncing with Google Calendar will still have the VALARM ACTION:AUDIO. In the case of the iOS calendar, presumably they work with VALARM ACTION:AUDIO just like the MacOS client, so the alerts will work on iOS just fine...just not within the Google Calendar web interface or on android.
Google Calendar and our syncing tools allow you to synchronize your events, however, alerts and notifications are cosmetic features included in the products, since Google Calendar and Mac Calendar are two completely different products (internally) they don't use the same language for specific features. This is something that has been escalated to both Product Teams, Google and Apple, currently there is no estimated time to know if this is going to be fix by both products to integrate the same internal language for alerts and notifications. We encourage you to keep using Google Products, and for your iOS devices, to download the Google Calendar app from your Apple Store.