Google confirms departure time and commute notifications broken

Just last month, Google Calendar’s departure time or time to leave notifications glitch was highlighted by majority of mainstream tech news publications, as it was being widely reported by users. While the matter earlier lacked an official confirmation, what’s now coming to light is that Google has acknowledged not only the aforementioned bug, also the ‘commute notifications not showing up’ issue as well.

Google employee Andy B (who is also the Community Manager at Google Search and Assistant help forum) clarified their earlier statement wherein they mistook departure time notifications for commute notifications.

Just yesterday, they apologised for the confusion and updated those affected that the concerned team is investigating both departure-time as well as commute notification issues. Here’s their actual statement:

Apologies for the initial misunderstanding and lack of updates–I had conflated the commute notifications feature with the primary issue being discussed on this thread (i.e. recommended departure times from Google Calendar events). I want to first confirm the team has been, and is currently, investigating these issues separately.

Furthermore they added

With regards to recommended departure times, although I don’t have any specific updates to share, I can say the team is monitoring this thread (in addition to other channels of feedback, like in-product reports) and is actively pursuing solutions to provide this functionality. I’ll continue to post updates on this thread.

To avoid any confusion, in case of the departure time/time to leave feature, Google app notifies for events/appointments saved in the Google Calendar (in the form of a card on Google feed). On the other hand, the commute notifications (A.K.A., Time-critical commute alerts) are a part of Google Maps for daily home to work (or vice-versa) traffic notifications.

We could also locate a thread on Issue Tracker addressing the agenda/departure time issue. But nothing much has been said on it lately.

While Google is investigating both issues, there’s no information on how long will they take to fix them. We hope they do it sooner than later. Rest assured, we’ll update as and when any further development takes place.

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