Garmin and Iphone

I’ve had a Garmin 810 for 4-5 years, and my father has a 820 for one year now, and we are both experiencing that the unit will not automatically upload consistently via the bluetooth to the Iphone. For me it always been like that, but my father is new to Garmin and really fed up with it. Both the units will not connect to the Iphone every time, sometimes it connects, but says “Upload failed” for whatever reason, and we both have to disconnect and connect it back to the Iphone over and over again.

This is not something we have experienced only when they got hacked, but a long time before this and also after.

Since this happens to both of us, and other people i’ve talked with, I’m guessing many of you guys also struggle with this, or am I wrong?

Someone have any helpful tricks?

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Bluetooth on the Garmin 520 and 530 has worked well with an iPhone 7 and now iPhone SE (2020). Very few issues.

Generally I’ve had very few problems with Bluetooth in cars, Fitbit tracker, an Apple Watch, Bluetooth headsets, etc.

That said, Bluetooth is not the most reliable radio technology. I’ve definitely seen issues from time to time.

There have been firmware updates recently to the x30 series that had phone connection fixes. Not sure if they went into the older units as well. @gplama just did a vid over on YouTube which you can check for the details.

I use a Forerunner 230 and an Edge 520 with an iPhone. The connection to Garmin Connect on iOS can indeed be flaky at times. I can go through a couple of weeks of flawless behavior, followed by periods of frustration. In general, killing the app and restarting it fixes the issue; sometimes rebooting the Garmin device is also needed. Both the app and the devices seem to paint themselves into a corner software-wise once in a while. And the use of two separate BT connections for Edge products makes the whole setup shaky to start with.

Sometimes in the past on my 530 said it was busy. I disconnected/forgot the unit in bt settings ios, deleted it from gc and then repaired to phone. Seems to have fixed it

My Garmin 510 has always been hit or miss with syncing. What I would do is put it on the charger at home while still connected to my iphone and then it would automagically snyc after some period of time sitting there. Sometimes I could force it to update by disconnecting/reconnecting bluetooth. Or, quitting the Garmin Connect app. I was growing to hate this little dance.

For a while, nothing I would do could make it sync so I used the cable. There was a bad firmware update last year that disabled syncing for a while.

I just upgraded to a 530 because of all this plus I wanted some of the new features. The 530 is rock solid and syncs every time whether over wireless or bluetooth.

Part of me wishes that I bought the 830 because of the touchscreen and slightly easier routing. (I was used to the touchscreen on the 510.) Overall though the 530 is really nice.

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A part of the hit-and-miss nature of the Garmin-BT-iOS connection is due to the peculiar way background processes are managed in iOS. The OS makes some decisions as to which process gets how much time running in the background. Apparently the API got updated in iOS 13, giving app developers more control over what happens when and how often in background.

This explains why sometimes the device and your phone will just stare at each other without syncing, until you go in Garmin Connect (moving the app into foreground). Then the device magically seems to connect and sync.

They called the app “Connect”, because that’s what you end up screaming at it.