PazByGoogle Keep dropped location reminders. PazBy is the replacement.
If you used Keep to nudge yourself near a place ("remind me when I'm near the bookshop"), Google moved everything else to Tasks — but Tasks doesn't do locations. Here's where to go instead.
What actually happened
Google Keep used to let you pin a location to a note and get a reminder when you were nearby — "buy milk when I'm near the grocery store," "drop off the package when I'm near the post office." It was one of Keep's most quietly useful features.
When Google migrated Keep's reminder system into Google Tasks, location reminders didn't come along. Tasks only does time-based reminders. Existing Keep location reminders stopped firing; new ones can't be created. Google's own help docs now suggest using Google Maps' "Saved places" list as a workaround — but Saved places is a passive list. It doesn't tap you on the shoulder when you walk past.
If you relied on this feature, you've been quietly stranded for months. You're not the only one.
Your options now
There are roughly three kinds of replacement: free dedicated apps, paid productivity suites, and PazBy. Honest breakdown of each.
Free dedicated location-alarm apps
Apps like Naplarm, GPS Alarm, EgiGeoZone, Task Nearby. They exist, they work, and they're free. Most carry ads, most haven't had a major UI refresh in years, and most are missing the convenience features that made Keep nice to use (voice announcements, share-from-Maps, per-place notes that get read out on arrival).
Good if: you only need the bare-minimum "buzz when I'm near coordinates X" and don't mind ads.
Paid productivity-suite tiers
Todoist Pro ($48/year), TickTick Premium ($36/year), Any.do Premium ($80/year). All three include location reminders as a Premium-tier feature alongside dozens of other to-do-list features you may not want.
Good if: you also need a fully-featured to-do-list app, and the location-reminder feature alone is worth the annual subscription to you. If you only wanted what Keep gave you, this is paying for a lot of furniture you didn't ask for.
PazBy Recommended
One-time $2.99 USD. No subscription. No account. Android only.
PazBy is a dedicated location-reminder app — the same shoulder-tap-when-nearby behaviour Keep had, with the small modern touches Keep was missing: per-place reminder text that gets read aloud on arrival ("Don't forget the drill bits"), approach alerts that give you a heads-up two minutes out when driving, one-shot zones that auto-delete after the first visit, encrypted local storage so your places never touch a server we operate, and optional encrypted Drive backup if you want them on more than one device.
Good if: you want a Keep-like experience that's actively maintained and won't get deprecated under you the next time Google reorganises its productivity stack.
How to migrate from Keep to PazBy
There isn't a one-shot bulk import — Keep never exposed pinned locations through any API or export format. But every saved place is roughly three taps:
- Open the Keep note with the pinned location. Tap the location pin at the top of the note. Keep hands you off to Google Maps centered on that spot.
- In Google Maps, tap Share. The standard Android share sheet opens.
- Choose PazBy. The save dialog opens with the place name and coordinates pre-filled. Add a reminder note ("Get the drill bits"), tune the radius if you want, hit Save. Done.
For a list of 20 saved places this takes about 5 minutes. For 5 it takes about a minute. You can do them gradually — keep PazBy installed and migrate places as you remember they existed.
What you'll have that Keep never gave you
- Per-place voice announcements. "Arrived at Canadian Tire. Don't forget: return drill bits." Read out through your phone speaker or car Bluetooth — useful when your hands are busy.
- Approach alerts. Optional per-place "heads-up while driving" mode — fires a couple of minutes out so you can plan a turn instead of realising you just blew past the exit.
- One-shot zones. Check "Auto-delete after first arrival" for the place you'll only visit once. It vanishes from your map the moment you've been there.
- Daily digest. A quiet once-a-day notification summarising the places you arrived at since the last digest. Lets you tell at a glance whether the radar is doing anything.
- Travel Mode. One toggle: hides your day-to-day errands list while you're on a trip, shows only the places you saved in the city you're visiting. Flip back when you're home and the local list snaps back.
- Available on Date/Time. Tag a place as visible only at certain times — useful for the Wednesday-only deal, the Happy Hour spot, the Saturday-morning farmer's market.
- Numbered nearby pins. Tap a button on the map to zoom out and frame every saved place within 100 km of where you are right now — handy when one errand turns into "and three other things while I'm in the area."
- Encrypted backup, your account. Optional backup to your own Google Drive's hidden app-data folder, AES-GCM encrypted with a passphrase only you know. We can't read your backups even if we wanted to.
Common questions
Is PazBy free?
It's a one-time $2.99 USD purchase from the Play Store. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads, no account required.
Does it work without internet?
The radar runs entirely on your device. Saved places live in an encrypted local database. You need GPS for the radar to fire (which doesn't need cellular data), and a Maps SDK call for the map tab to render tiles — but the alerts themselves don't need a network at all.
Will it drain my battery?
It's designed to sit in the background quietly. A smart "gearbox" drops the GPS into very low-power mode when you've been parked at home for a while and wakes it back up when you start moving. Real-world battery cost for typical use is in the 1–3% per day range.
Can I share places with someone?
Yes — long-press a saved zone, tap Share. PazBy sends a link your contact can open. If they have PazBy installed, the link opens directly in the save dialog with everything pre-filled. If they don't, the link opens a small web page that shows the place and offers to install PazBy.
What about iPhone?
Android only for now. Apple Reminders has location reminders built in — that's the iPhone-side answer (and it's the one most former Keep users on iPhone already know about).
Why won't Google bring Keep location reminders back?
We don't know. Google deprecates features all the time and rarely explains. The structural reason is probably that Tasks was designed around a calendar-and-time model, not a geofence one — adding location reminders back would mean a substantial rebuild on Google's side for what was always a niche feature. Don't hold your breath.
One-time $2.99. Save your first place in under a minute.
No subscription. No account. No ads. The radar starts working the moment you grant the location permission.