Garmin has released an end-of-year summary of users’ stats, Spotify Wrapped-style. But it’s only available to people who pay for Garmin Connect+, the new paid subscription that Garmin has offered since March of this year. I’ll show you what’s inside the Year in Review, and give you my thoughts on how the subscription service has weathered its first almost-year. Spoiler: The more things Garmin adds, the less they seem to know what they're doing.
What’s in the Year in Review?
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/GarminTotal steps
Body Battery average daily high
Total activity time
Total activity ascent
Badges earned
There are shareable cards for each, so it’s certainly fulfilling the function of a yearly recap, but it’s a bit boring to page through. I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care about my average Body Battery, and it’s not exactly a revelation that I did more gym workouts than bike rides. Perhaps this will get more polished in future years.
Garmin, by making theirs a premium feature, doesn’t seem to be prioritizing any of the above. I see two things going on here: They're competing with Strava, and grappling with what it means to exist as a hardware company in a subscription-based world.
Comparing Garmin’s recap to Strava’s, Strava’s feels more cohesive. There are fewer cards in the carousel, and they’re more relevant to things I care about. I get my activities and distance in the same card, find out how long I’ve kept my weekly streak (over a year!), see the days I was active, get reminded of one highlight run (definitely a memorable one), see my PRs for all the major distances, and get a shout-out on the one QOM and couple of Local Legend titles I earned. It’s easier for Strava to do this well because their platform is tailored to people with specific goals: to run or bike more and faster. Garmin tries harder to be everything to everybody.
Garmin’s Connect+ subscription doesn’t seem to be the paywall people are afraid of (or the cash cow Garmin is probably hoping for)
Garmin has always been a hardware company at heart, but that model has been harder and harder to fit with the modern wearables market. Now that we all have smartphones, many of the features we expect from a Garmin watch are really features of a phone app. So to keep selling watches in different pricing tiers, Garmin ties specific features to the hardware you’ve bought. You’ll only get a “training status” in the app if you’ve paired a training status-capable watch, for example. (The Forerunner 265 counts, but not the 165.)
Garmin has long sold subscriptions for some devices, but those were always specific things like satellite messaging or high-definition marine charts, where the purpose and the cost made sense. Garmin Connect+, which launched this year, is basically a subscription for software features of the phone app, not a device.
But that leaves the Connect+ subscription without anything vital to offer. I’ve gone through and listed all the features you get, and I think the only one that’s really worthwhile is mirroring data to your phone, which both Apple and Coros will give you for free. The rest are all “huh?” features, like unlocking special badges or gaining access to an AI feature that is surely the least useful of all fitness apps’ AI features (and that’s really saying something).
Year in Review must have been easy to build, but it doesn’t give us anything worth paying for. Garmin has been advertising the Year in Review to non-subscribers, suggesting that we pay for a subscription to access it. I just don’t think it’s working, Garmin.
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