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Turn off automatic sync with Strava

JoeD
over 1 year ago

I use a Fenix 7 watch, and I am pretty certain that up until a couple of months ago, I could end my activity (run, cycling) on my watch and it would not sync to Garmin Connect and therefore Strava until I started the Garmin Connect app on my phone (iPhone 12).

Now, when I end my activity, within a minute or two, it is automatically syncing and posting to Strava.

I would like the old behavior of not syncing until I start the Garmin Connect app.

Is there something that changed or something I can change to get this back?

In Garmin Connect, I tried changing the "Activities" toggle for Strava to "off" where it says "Automatically share your Garmin activities with Strava", thinking that this would let me manually share the activity with Strava, but that stopped the sharing altogether.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    You can force stop the app on your iPhone (swiping it up in the app selector). That should prevent any syncing over BT. You can also disable the "Phone" option on the watch (you can define a hot key for that purpose), or on the phone, That will also prevent any syncing. However, all of that assumes that you do not use the Wi-Fi option on your Fenix 7 for syncing the watch, since that would bypass all of the previously mentioned measures. If so, disable the Wi-Fi on the F7 too.

    However, there is a simpler way to prevent publishing your activities on Strava automatically: set the default privacy / visibility level at Strava on new activities to "Me Only", and only share selected activities with connections or publicly, when you want to.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to trux

    I know for certain that Garmin Connect is not running. It does not appear when I swipe up.

    I'm not trying to prevent syncing or sharing on Strava. I just want to determine when it happens. 

    For example, let's say I take a few photos on my run. I want to look through them and upload a few to Strava with my run right after it posts - but I'm driving home from the run and it syncs while I'm in my car. I wanted it to do it after I got home.

    For years, I could end my run on my watch, and wait until I got home and start Garmin Connect and then it would sync.

    But about two months ago or so, not sure if it was an update or what, but it started syncing almost immediately after I saved the run on my watch.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to JoeD

    If you do not see the app in the App Switcher of your iPhone, then the watch is syncing over Wi-Fi, as I wrote.

    Still, the simplest solution is changing the default privacy in Strava. In that way you can add photos and comments, and make the activity visible only when it is done. That's exactly how I do it too. It also prevents publishing all the diverse activities like strength, yoga, walks, indoor bike, etc, that I do not want to share at all, since they are completely uninteresting, and just spamming others.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to trux

    It can't be syncing over WiFi. Most of the time when I end my run, I'm literally in the woods next to a creek and can barely get a good LTE signal let alone WiFi... It gets a good enough signal to upload to Garmin and sync to Strava, but photos will never upload correctly from there.

    I get your solution about making them private in Strava, but what I'm saying is this all worked fine up until a couple of months ago. It would not sync with Garmin until I started Garmin Connect on my phone.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to JoeD
    JoeD said:
    It gets a good enough signal to upload to Garmin and sync to Strava, but photos will never upload correctly from there

    Photos do not sync to Strava anyway, so it does not really matter.