Ok, now that I finally found this thread I will try to keep emotions low but I want to give my emphasis on the importance of the original request. I experience the same behavior of my vivosmart HR as it was described before: until the beginning of this week, I was able to synchronize my device with my Android phone without having location services turned on. - Now that's not possible anymore.
Now here is the thing: whoever problem or change this was, GARMIN, you guys have to fix this as soon as possible otherwise I predict you will lose a lot of your business here in Europe and probably in other parts of the world, too. Probably it's a cultural thing but over here, data privacy and tracking of location IS an issue and for many people a no-go so we need an option to have this turned off! Otherwise , this is a very fast and certain way to turn happy customers into leavers. It would really be a pity, I did like my device so far.
Ahh, and one more advice: don't wait until this goes to press or social media, please take this issue serious!
We would not be able to explain why users did not have to have location services on prior to the lasted Garmin Connect Mobile update while still running 6.0, as this was a change introduced by Android with the Marshmallow update. We would recommend reaching out to our support team (information in signature) to investigate this further.
I don't want to be expert of all problems with my watch i just want to be user and everything should be fine.That's fair enough – so if Garmin, being the maker of both your watch and the Garmin Connect Mobile app, advises that:
This is joke???
Now is Garmin fault for sure!!!
So what happened to wanting to just be the user, whose place is to be told how things work (so that “everything should be just fine”) and what their/his/her/your limitations are?
The whole point of being a user is that it's not up to you to decide the scope, implementation and constraints. Google made a decision. Garmin decided not to get around it, or maybe it experimented with getting around it and then decided to switch back. Either way, your preferences do not matter as a user.
For the record, I don't like leaving Location service enabled on my mobile devices, and so I don't. However, I equally dislike people who jump up and down thinking they are party to decision-making and have a say in things that affect them, when they actually don't.
I also can prove that this is Garmin fault.
Before this faulty update I had a full freedom in matter of connecting my Fenix 3. I could connect it with/without navigation enabled, hell, even without disabled internet/wi-fi. Now it is a total mess. I have a lot of problems in term of connecting and syncing. Many really bizarre problems like: GC doesn't recognize my wi-fi as web connect, or mentioned compulsion of enabled location services.
This last issue is not a point of Android 6.0. I have 6.0.1 since a few months and just right after an update I got this baggage of problems. I advice just downgrade GC to earlier version and wait for a fix. Then all the problems disappears just like with sanctifying grace. But, I spotted one issue with this solution. I lost an option to sync my watch to PC by Garmin Express, but If I have to choose between working GC and GE, I'm choosing working GC. :)
according to ASmugDill you are wrong.
Garmin team dont makes mistakes they are so creative so ......
And we are just stupid users and we dont have right to complain.
