Google will no longer support its Calendar app on a number of Android devices. This change will come into effect from December 2023.
This is big news for a good number of Android users as Google apps are generally preferred over default apps on smartphones. Using Google apps is also preferable as regardless of the manufacturer, all Android phones come with Google app pre-installed, making it easier to transfer data.
So if Google kills support for the Calendar app, the users will have to make some changes. Here’s the detail about who will be affected by the discontinuation of the Google Calendar app:
The smartphones running on Android 7.1 or earlier versions will no longer support the Google Calendar app.
The Android 7.1 was launched about seven years ago in 2016 and as of December 2022, 1.6 percent of Android devices were still running the Android 7.1 update.
The operating system is so old that Google stopped delivering security updates on it after October 2019. So, it’s quite unlikely that you are still running the Android 7.1 update on your phone.
In other words, you need to have at least Android 8.0 Oreo to access Google Calendar.
It should be noted that Google hasn’t made this information official. This has been reported by a reverse engineer who found a flag in the Google Calendar app that claims “UnsupportedOperatingSystem__enabled.”
This basically means that Google is in the process of ending support for the app for select devices.
The simplest solution to this discontinuation is to update your phone to the latest update. But, in this case, a phone running on Android 7.1 wouldn’t support Android 13 or 14. So basically you will have to buy a new phone.
If you are not yet ready to say goodbye to your phone, you can simply migrate your data from Google Calendar to the default calendar app in your phone.