Gear list within activity always changing order

If you mean the list of shoes on the Gear screen, after tapping on the automatically assigned gear, then I see my shoes always sorted alphabetically in the same way. Only when you retire a pair, it is moved to the bottom of the list (also sorted alphabetically there). However, I prefer using GC Web on a computer, where the assignment is much more comfortable and quicker.

So there are two gear screens — one that you access by tapping the “more” button on the bottom right, and the other within the actual activity.

Yes, the gear list accessed from outside the activity is in alphabetical order, but the gear list within the activity where you select the shoes used for that run is in seemingly random order. That is where I’m having the issue — within the activity.

Personally, I prefer not to have my gear automatically assigned because I rotate through different shoes on every run. 

4009661 said:

I prefer not to have my gear automatically assigned

Exactly the way mine is set.

• In Garmin Connect Web go to https://connect.garmin.com/modern/gear
• Select the shoes you have set as default > Edit
• Uncheck all, then save.

4009661 said:

the gear list within the activity where you select the shoes used for that run is in seemingly random order.

I have it alphabetically sorted there too - current gear first (alphabetically sorted), then retired gear at the bottom (alphabetically sorted too)

OK, I did some more tests. Till now, I looked at activities, where the gear was already assigned, and there the list is indeed sorted alphabetically. Now, I searched an activity without any gear assigned yet, and there indeed the list is without the sorting.

Unfortunately there is no option for sorting the gear, in the app, but as a workaround you can let assign a pair of shoes automatically, and then when you go to change it, the list will be sorted. Or even better - use Garmin Connect Web, instead. Other than that, you can also report it to the Product Support through their website at https://support.garmin.com and request a change, but that usually has no effect, unless there are hundreds of similar requests. 

Yeah I posted about this a million times, reported it through the Garmin ideas page, submitted it as feedback when the new Connect app was in beta (as suggested by a Garmin employee in the forums). The only thing I didn’t do was contact Garmin support (bc to be quite honest, I don’t want to go through a tedious back and forth.)

It’s ridiculous.

Other dumb things (in the app):

- the gear tab is separate from the gear selection UI. To see your currently selected gear, you go to the activity gear tab, but to change gear, you have to tap 3 dots > Add or Remove Gear. (Unless the activity currently has no gear, in which case you can add gear from the gear tab using the Add button.)

- the gear selection UI allows you to select multiple gear for the same activity, so if you want to change shoes, you have to deselect the current pair and select the new pair. (If you only selected the new pair, your existing pair would stay selected, and you’d have 2 pairs of shoes selected for the same activity, as if that makes sense.) If Garmin wanted to preserve the possibility of selecting multiple gear for an activity, they could have introduced a separate toggle to enter “multi-select mode” or something. But the default behavior for shoes should be that only one pair can be selected for a given activity. (Even if someone wore multiple pairs of shoes for an 24-hour race or something, it’s not like the mileage would be tracked properly if you assigned multiple shoes to one running activity.)

Both of these things really suck if you have default shoes selected for running (for example).

The randomly changing order of gear is ridiculous in any case, especially when you want to change gear for multiple activities (you can’t rely on muscle memory.)

It’s really frustrating how Garmin often fails at the little things like this. As others have said, it’s like they don’t use their own stuff.

Compare with Strava, where there’s a simple drop down in the edit activity page which simultaneously shows you the currently selected pair of shoes, allows you to select a new pair with a few taps as possible (1 to open the drop down, 1 to select the new pair), and doesn’t randomize the order of your shoes for no reason. Ofc you lose the ability to select multiple pairs of shoes for the same activity, but I doubt too many people complain about that. (I will say that it’s nice that Garmin allows you to assign shoes to non-running activities like basketball. I can’t track my basketball in shoes strava bc it won’t allow shoes to be assigned to cardio or generic workouts.)

trux said:

Till now, I looked at activities, where the gear was already assigned, and there the list is indeed sorted alphabetically.

Yeah that doesn’t help bc in that part of the UI (the gear tab), it’s just a list of gear that’s already assigned.

The problem is that the list of gear to add or remove from an activity is always in a different order.

Ofc it’s not a problem for you if you always use the default gear (meaning you never change it manually) or you just use the Connect website (which has its own problems).

4009661 said:

what is the criteria for shoes changing order in the list every time?

This is a great question. I did notice that the gear order (in the app's activity gear selection list) def changes after you add or remove gear from any activity. It also can change when accessing the gear selection list (without add/removing gear) in different activities, or when closing and reopening the app. If you open the list multiple times within the same activity (without adding/removing gear), the order seems to stay the same.

I also tried pressing the Gear button in an activity on the Garmin Connect website and inspecting the corresponding network traffic - there is a request for gear, and it's returned in the exact same order every time - afaict it's returned in the order the gear was created. (Ofc on the website itself, the gear is sorted alphabetically). And in this response, none of the contents are changing (the exact content of the gear list, including all timestamps stays the same between requests.)

Could be that the app is using a different backend request which returns gear in a random order, for whatever reason. And nobody noticed or cared, maybe bc they only tested with 2 pieces of gear (in which case this bug would only be mildly annoying, assuming you always have default gear.)