HI, thought I'd share this here in case it proves to be of use to anyone else.
I have had the same issues that a lot of Huawei / Honor owners have been posting regarding keeping their watches connected to the Garmin Connect App. I have a Mate 20 Pro running EMUI 9 and a Forerunner 230 and it would consistently lose connection and always fail to reconnect if out of range. Specifically as well, it would only remain connected while the Connect App was running. Coming from an iPhone, this was a massive nuisance. I even chatted to someone from Garmin Support who said it was not possible to keep the connection without the app running (wrong). The steps I took are what the most common suggestions are - turn of battery management for Connect (toggle run in background, autolaunch, secondary launch) and also set the app to Not Allowed under Special Access > Battery Management. None of this helped, still randomly disconnected, lost connection when I quit the app or killed all tasks and wouldn't reconnect when it had gone out of range unless I opened the connect app again. Also tried the system-level pairing from within the Connect App (long press on device and choosing Update Connection). Basically nothing worked at all. Not even after rebooting the phone many times.
Then I switched launcher. Specifically I downloaded and installed the Blackberry Launcher and suddenly it started working. I can now kill all apps, including Connect and it still works. The watch loses bluetooth connection for about 5 seconds (icon disappears) and then it reconnects again. And it does this without booting up the Connect app. Notifications come through to the watch just fine. And when I switched back to EMUI, it continued to work. I've even deleted the blackberry launcher and its still working exactly as it used to on the iPhone, independently of the App.
I appreciate this isn't an exhaustive solution, but I'm not in a position to flatten my phone and try and replicate this, but this is what I did and now it works. Whether it is a combination of all of those or something to do with switching to a new launcher, I don't know but if anyone else wants to try and see if is solves their issue, maybe we can get a definitive solution. Clearly though what the Garmin support guy told me about needing to have the app open and there was no way around the disconnection because it was a Huawei phone is not true!
Anyway good luck and hopefully this will help someone else out! At least I don't need to buy a new watch just for notifications now ...
Rob
