Garmin Connect
Ranked 4 of 4 fitness apps by recommenders
Recommended as a central place to view fitness stats and sleep data. The iOS app and web interface draw repeated complaints about bugs and missing features.
Recommended as a central place to view fitness stats and sleep data. The iOS app and web interface draw repeated complaints about bugs and missing features.
15 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 33%
Recommended in 2 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 2 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Awful iOS app, unreliable connection
“I also feel relieved to not use the awful iOS app or website anymore.”
Comment from 15 Oct 2026 in “Creating a Garmin "MCP"” “the Garmin app on iOS is pretty bad at keeping a live connection up”
Comment from 29 Jul 2026 in “Una Watch: Garmin watch competitor but repairable, open ecosystem and USB-C” Hostile to data export and API access
“Garmin on the other hand seems to be actively hostile if you (as an end user) want to programmatically interact with their ecosystem.”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “I Connected My Withings Body+ to Home Assistant with an ESP32” “they removed the export option from the mobile application though”
Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues”
Other fitness apps people recommend
The three most recommended other fitness apps, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gadgetbridge | 24 | 3 | 89% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Strava | 20 | 30 | 40% | 9 | — | — |
| Intervals.icu | 9 | 2 | 82% | 5 | — | — |
| Garmin ConnectThis page | 5 | 10 | 33% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
All 15 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Garmin Connect takes my active lifestyle seriously.”
“I also feel relieved to not use the awful iOS app or website anymore.”
“I've started exporting my sleep data from Garmin connect.”
“uploading everything to garmin connect and letting it have your data and do the work”
“Garmin on the other hand seems to be actively hostile if you (as an end user) want to programmatically interact with their ecosystem.”
“the Garmin app on iOS is pretty bad at keeping a live connection up”
“their planner, in general, is garbage”
“Apple with all of it's nearly unlimited budget cannot do what Connect does.”
“they're running out of hardware optimization opportunities to push people to new devices”
“It's outdated, it doesn't cash anything at all”
“the Connect app is actually pretty good in terms of a central place to look at the stats.”
“Thats the app, not the watch.”
“They unsupported old version of android for the garmin connect app pretty fast”
“the web UI doesn't show aggregated stats by year and activity type”
“they removed the export option from the mobile application though”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.