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Garmin Connect Android Notifications broken

7397559
12 days ago

Starting with the October 8th 2025 5.18 Android release, notifications sent from phone to watch no longer vibrate the watch.

I wear a Garmin Forerunner 255 and use a Google Pixel 9A with the latest version of Android as well as the most up to date security release. 

 If I set a timer or alarm on the watch, it will vibrate at the conclusion of said timer/alarm, but all notifications received on the phone sent to the watch simply do not vibrate it.

It is not related to “do not disturb”, that setting is turned off.

I downgraded to the 5.17.2 and the watch started to vibrate on phone notifications again. Therefore, as far as I can tell it is a software bug with Garmin Connect version 5.18.

EDIT: This seems to be related to Androids own "Do Not Distrub", previously Garmin Connect would ignore Androids Do Not Disturb setting, but now it is following it.

I have tried to escalate this to the Garmin Android Dev team (reachable at [email protected] - I'd suggest people also try to reach out), but the person who responded to my emails was unable to understand the issue, even after pointing them to this forum post & others on social media. 

  • 0 5 days ago

    To give some perspective to this matter, just about two weeks ago there was a long thread on this forum where people were furious because the watch didn't follow Do-Not-Disturb settings of the phone (saying that this was their last Garmin watch because of that). Now Garmin has listened to them and the tide has turned, previously happy people are complaining about the new behaviour...

    I wonder if Garmin ever believes that if they decide to listen to complaints and change some behaviour, they should offer an option to keep the old behaviour for those who prefer that? Although I understand it makes the software and UI more complicated, so currently they are probably just calculating which option pisses off less people. But it's annoying when you cannot rely on features staying available.

  • 0 5 days ago in reply to Bitti

    To give some further perspective, I don't think this is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, and Garmin could have done a great many things to avoid this problem (not exhaustive list):

    • figure out what is the typical use case by questionnaires or by getting analytics from its app and not make a change that goes against a very typical use case
    • announce a change in advance (maybe on this forum) and give possible workarounds
    • give detailed change logs for Garmin Connect updates (as far as I know we only guess what changes each time)
    • give any sort of "major changes" message for Garmin Connect updates
    • fill in the "what's new" section of the Play Store
    • have a notification or in app card warn users about the DND behavior change ahead of time
    • have an in-app notification about the DND behavior change, after the update

    ANY of these would have helped at least some of us to not struggle with this and spend days of figuring out what is wrong with our watches and missing calls and notifications. The fact that none of these low hanging fruit options were chosen by Garmin speaks a lot about how little this company values us, its users, unfortunately. But hey, profit is up this quarter, so they must be doing literally everything right, according to the executives.

    Let's see how this plays out if they continue this way and lose the respect of their core supporters. I'm surely going to take a lot more careful look for alternatives when choosing my next watch. Suunto, Coros, Polar and even Amazfit is catching up slowly, without raising their prices by 40% each time they release a new version of their watches.

  • 0 5 days ago in reply to Bitti

    The thing is: it doesn't really follow DND: the mode is not activated on the watch when it is activated on the phone. Also other vibrations are still there (phone disconnected, ...), so it isn't even a full DND. 

    For me is just silently drops vibrations for smart notifications. 

  • 0 5 days ago in reply to 5305734

    We need to point out to them that this is specific to android. With the iPhone, when the phone is set to dnd the watch still vibrates. How can we have inconsistent behavior with different phones.

  • 0 5 days ago in reply to 4487079

    Need to point out to them that this is specific to android. With the iPhone, when the phone is set to dnd the watch still vibrates. How can we have inconsistent behavior with different phones.

  • 0 5 days ago in reply to JensDoe

    Here is the latest official response from Garmin Support 

    -------------

    Thank you for contacting Garmin product support regarding the changes made to Do Not Disturb (DND) settings. Starting with the 5.18 release of the Connect app, the DND settings on an Android phone will carry over to notifications on Garmin watches. While an Android phone is in DND mode, notifications will not alert on your watch but will still be visible by swiping to your watch’s notification center or glance. 

    A workaround is to configure DND to all certain apps’ notifications to come through DND, but this will cause them to alert on your phone as well. 

    I have added your information to an internal ticket we have tracking customer contacts regarding this change. We currently do not have plans to revert the Do Not Disturb behavior to the previous version but may reconsider if contact volume is significant.

    Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns and we’ll be happy to assist you further. 

    ‐-----------------------------

    Anyone who wants Garmin to fix this, please contact Garmin support directly report this. It sounds like they will listen if there's enough of us.

  • 0 4 days ago

    I was having lots of issues with not getting notifications so I had to reset my phone to its default software and turn off automatic updates so that no updates would push to my phone. This is the only way I could get the watch to work the way it was supposed to. Finally update17.30 came out and it was working perfectly for about 3 days, until today. Another update pushed to my watched this afternoon, although when checking the software under "About" after install it still says 17.30 on the watch, but it has completely jacked up the watch again. Now holding buttons down for functions don't even work correctly, much less getting notifications correctly. I don't know what's going on with Garmin, but this is incredibly frustrating and will likely lead to a lot of customers leaving, including me! 

  • 0 4 days ago in reply to 4487079

    The latest response I received from Garmin Support just now confirms that as many people as possible need to contact Garmin support to get them to fix it:

    Thank you for contacting Garmin product support regarding the changes made to Do Not Disturb (DND) settings. Starting with the 5.18 release of the Connect app, the DND settings on an Android phone will carry over to notifications on Garmin watches. While an Android phone is in DND mode, notifications will not alert on your watch but will still be visible by swiping to your watch’s notification center or glance.

    A workaround is to configure DND to all certain apps’ notifications to come through DND, but this will cause them to alert on your phone as well.

    I have added your information to an internal ticket we have tracking customer contacts regarding this change. We currently do not have plans to revert the Do Not Disturb behavior to the previous version but may reconsider if contact volume is significant. Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns and we’ll be happy to assist you further.


    Thank you for choosing Garmin,

    __________________________________

    Everyone, please contact Garmin support to give your support to getting this fixed 

  • 0 4 days ago

    WTF! This is the most important feature!! I have used DND for years. Need my family to have sound through DND, but cant have sound for anything else in my work. Thats why I use the watch to vibrate to get notifications.
    Last weeks Ive had to go back to my Samsung watch because of this. This is the biggest *** ive heard from Garmin in years.
    Why? Just why? Atleast make an option for this ipmportant feature!

    At the moment my Fenix 8 is just a really expensive toy witch I cant even use exept as a diving computer for my dives.

  • 0 4 days ago in reply to Neo121183

    Hi Neo121183, I feel your pain. Garmin support told me that they might fix it if enough people contact them. I suggest you contact Garmin support and add your voice to the cause.