What is the Difference Between the "Move IQ" and "Auto Activity Start" Settings?

I'll take the risk of awakening an old thread just to give other people the chance to understand what – and how good or bad – Garmin's "Move IQ", "Auto Activity Start" and "Auto Pause" (the latter under Activity Profiles' settings) are.

My personal short verdict, based on years-long experience with three different Garmin devices is: "This is a bursting marketing bubble".

If you don't share this opinion, then kindly point us to your good arguments. But before that, please read the below remarks, as well as the similar thread we had in the past here: https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivoactive-4-series/267136/i-am-not-getting-move-iq-on-my-watch

Originally, Move IQ was there to auto-detect "exercising patterns such as biking, running, swimming, walking, or using an elliptical machine". Unfortunately, there is no transparency as of what Garmin hardware detects what. In general, most current models detect walking and one more – largely running or biking. More sadly, these are categorized as daily "events" and not activities, i.e., you will see them in your daily timeline, but they are not shown in the activity history.

For "Auto Activity Start", the reality seems even more miserable. Firstly, it is by design (choice of settings) limited to walking and running activities only. Secondly, this works only for walking. A previous device which perfectly well detected and tracked running exercises via Move IQ – and recorded them as Events – never auto-started, although both settings were activated. Ironically, my current VivoSport, does not even recognize running. But funnily enough, it reliably recognizes biking.

And then the final part: "Auto Pause". This can be configured per Activity Profile. The nice description that is will "temporarily stop recording until you resume" sounds like the correct choice for a running profile, especially if your track has obstacles such as traffic lights. Unfortunately, the negative effect is that "temporary" is not limited to short intervals – even an hour after walking or running it still stays paused, until you manually stop and save the activity.

To summarize, I believe that initially these three features had a great potential both separately and working together. But they never reached their maturity, probably the software development budget was cut off, and now only the online articles get updated with a lot of gotchas, and maybes (aka notes, and compatibility lists) as you can check for yourselves.