Bluetooth support for Garmin activity trackers by creating an app in the Garmin Connect IQ store

Feature requests
1

From Chris Long on 2015/04/26 17:49:43 +0000

Creating a Sleep as Android app for the Garmin Connect IQ store has the possibility to work with 4 different Garmin devices such as the Vivoactive. I previously used the pebble app and really liked the integration and would like to see it for my new vivoactive.

Copied from original feature request: http://urbandroid.uservoice.com/forums/264867-sleep-as-android/suggestions/7713369-bluetooth-support-for-garmin-activity-trackers-by

2

From Ryan on 2017/01/17 02:40:49 +0000

Petr, thank you for your efforts. This would be the icing on the cake that is the greatest sleep app available.

3

From Petr Nálevka on 2017/01/10 14:09:12 +0000

+Ryan we are very close to an experimental version of the IQ Connect appI expect we can have something for BETA testing in few week time… but please note that every such integration is a several month time investment for us and is very costly in terms of development…

4

From Ryan Ward on 2017/01/10 13:40:22 +0000

This is kind of depressing to see people have been posting about this since 2015 and here we are in 2017 and stil have no support.

5

From Chris Scutcher on 2017/01/04 16:37:18 +0000

See also https://urbandroid.uservoice.com/forums/264867-sleep-as-android/suggestions/7591950-sleeptracking-for-garmin-watches-connectiq-fenix

6

From Vince on 2015/05/27 07:31:05 +0000

Im ok with you, if i can connect garmin connect with android,as android, it's better for garmin because sleep app on vivosmart isn't really good, and we need informations about sleep of sleep as android to complete what we need. And if we have connection between garmin connect and sleep as android, we have in the same time a connection with myfitnesspal.

7

i just got notified about this thread and came here to comment that the sleep as a garmin app is already on the connectIQ store and is working good on my vivoactive!

thanks for all the effort. if there’s room for improvement, now syncing with connect app would be great.

8

Hello,

thank you for your feedback. There is a large bug in the Garmin communication API which Garmin refuses to fix for years. Occasionally the Garmin Connect Mobile app clogs up the communication between our app and the watch. In that case, we’ve found out that force stopping and then starting the Garmin Connect Mobile app will refresh the comm queue and then it should work normally.

We tried to contact Garmin on this several times but they just ignore this issue. So our patience just run out now and we have moved to a quite nasty but hopefully fuctional workaround.

We’ve just finished an update of the Garmin integration which uses a different method of communication between the app and the watch, which is apparently working much better than the direct method we used before. We use both of those methods simultaneously and if the old one fails, we switch to the new method. From our tests, this has good results and we haven’t had any missed data in any night we’ve been testing with this.
On Vivoactive 3, we’re also seeing around 15% battery drain per 8h of tracking (with HR/HRV on).

If you want to try this, you’re going to need two things - a new Garmin addon for phone, and a new watch app. Both of these are currently labeled as beta and not published for general availability. So to try it, please follow the steps below.

  1. Get beta of the phone addon:
  2. Register for beta testing of the Sleep as Android Garmin addon here >> https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.urbandroid.sleep.garmin
  3. Make sure the beta update gets downloaded on your phone.
  4. Get the updated watch app
  5. First uninstall the Sleep app from your watch using the Garmin Connect app ( Garmin Connect > tap on your watch > Activities & App Management > Activities & Apps > Sleep > Uninstall )
  6. Download the .prg file for your watch model in the list here: https://sleep.urbandroid.org/garmin-beta-watch-app.
  7. Connect your watch to your computer via USB. Put the .prg file on your watch in /GARMIN/APPS folder (just like you would put it on a USB drive).
  8. Run Sleep on your watch!

Please let me know any thoughts or feedback you’d have about this.

1 Like