Google has long allowed you to save birthdays and other anniversaries to your contacts, allowing you to have a central place collecting all information you have at hand for somebody. However, notifications were not handled too well, as we called out when Android's 14th birthday came up. It looks like Google is finally changing that, with Google Calendar reportedly working on a feature that lets you add custom birthdays and notifications.

As spotted by Twitter user @AssembleDebug, Google is putting UI into place that will make it much easier to add new birthdays to Calendar itself and set up reminders for them. A new pop-up will greet you when you open the Calendar app that will make it possible to Add birthdays. The hint will continue to live below the app bar, allowing you quick access to the feature until you either add a birthday or dismiss the dialog with the “Not now” button.

Source: @AssembleDebug

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When you add a birthday using the feature, you can add a custom name for the person whose birthday it is and add a date, either with or without a year. Once that's done, you can set custom reminders in the following screen. It's even possible to set multiple reminders. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like you can add or edit reminders for existing contacts from Google Contacts, though this might still change later down the line. It also seems like birthdays added straight to Calendar will not show up in the Contacts app, though again, this is still something that could change later down the line.

@AssembleDebug confirmed to us that the feature is currently still under development in version 2023.08.2-511758217-release of the app and can only be activated by changing a few flags, so it’s not something you can easily reproduce right now. It’s still great to see Google finally working on support for customized birthday reminders.

Google Calendar has shown you birthdays and anniversaries in the past already, but so far, it has never been possible to set up reminders — let alone customize them. The new tweak makes it easier for you to plan ahead, so you could set a reminder for a few weeks in advance. Right now, birthday reminders are only available through Google Assistant. Google was also just caught working on adding reminders to the Google Contacts app itself this weekend.

Thanks: @AssembleDebug