Using Connect App without Internet access

Echoing what has been said here. These watches are being marketed towards the outdoor adventure market which inherently will have many people needing functionality to work offline. For me, I commonly find myself wanting to load a gpx route from a gps map app on my phone while at a trailhead or while on the trail, neither of which are likely to have cell signal. This severely limits the navigational utility of the watch since I would essentially need to know what route I want to follow before ever getting to a trailhead. Additionally if I need to adapt my route in the field due to conditions, I can’t load an adjusted route to the watch and use it to navigate. 

By not supporting this functionality, I can easily see garmin losing market share in the outdoor market as it practically reduces the watch’s function to a simple activity tracker, of which there are many competitors that offer similar devices. 

I’m sitting at my cardiologist office trying to show him my stats from my Garmin connect app and I cannot receive one bit of damn information. This is a joke

I don’t use Strava or any other connected app. So I do not have a choice to see mobile data.

I’m talking about your phone settings. Nothing to do with Strava. You need to check that you are allowing the connect app to use mobile data rather just using Wifi when available 

Got it. Thanks 

Unfortunately mostly just echoing all the other sentiments here. Ridiculous that an outdoor-enthusiast marketed watch can't update offline. What the heck Garmin? Unbelievably stupid policy.

I think the reason is money and control.

We save a TON of data which is useful to a lot of agencies including healthcare providers, governments and of course Garmin.

I imagine the first two entities will appreciate the information on a macro level whilst Garmin will be, also, able to provide personal feedback (insights etc) and tailor its First Beat algorithms. 

I read that Apple is collaborating with health care providers and it wouldnt surprise me if Garmin are looking to do the same.

Without access to all our lovely data they couldn't. 

Offline doesn't mean that Garmin will not get your data. Just force you to go online every second week or so. Or that some functions are only available in online mode.

You already have all your data offline in your watch. More and more data are directly available in the watch and you can even get reports on the watch. Historic data for longer time back is harder to see, but the past week is usually very easy.

It’s absurd. Someone needs to get through the protocols and open source this thing, allowing apps to be used from outside their terrible “store.” Like, how can’t you actually combine multiple activities in a good way. I digress. 
Spotify does a great job at this sort of thing - if you have premium and downloaded playlists, you can change them (even adding songs from another playlist that’s been downloaded) and then I guess it syncs the updated playlists when a connection is back. Like seriously. Some of these watches are $1000 and up, we should be getting software that matches that price tag. Some of the sensor readings are seemingly off by a bit in many cases, and weird things are and aren’t counted properly. Being able to talk in both directions would be huge. It’s also not impossible. When I needed to factory reset my MK2s because some theme or something was decimating battery usage; before removing everything on the watch I connected my iPhone to my pc, downloaded all the activities that are still cached on the phone (and, you kidding me!?) and don’t remember if I put them back, but whether I put the data back or a sync with their data did, but the history prior to the reset is still in the app. 
Between the combo of what’s already available we should be able to:

pre req: fully understand the comms protocols. 
1. see if we can sync over wifi and not just bt (without getting through binaries this may not be trivial, but this may then work for many more things than activity comms and may be as simple as a different app on the watch for syncing. Ok cool but going through that gets an understanding of how the data is managed and how comms work.

2. Based on the last 2 it should be fully possible for the phone to talk to the watch. But it still may refuse to sync if the watch also requires a token. That may be hard to fake and may only work for and hour after the last garmin sync. POC a transfer of the same sort of sync - just get the same data packaged in the app and rest of the transfer (hr, steps, etc) even if it’s not in human readable format

3. Break that data wide open! If someone was able to break through the comms and sync the would be files this may not be so hard but may require things like creating 0 activity activities to save because those should be the easiest to use to get a sense of the hex format of the data. profit. No very seriously. If all this works for anyone, please, please, GitHub the source not just releases. Please. 

future optional: 

work through the apps in the watch, custom apps, and use the official sdk (gotta assume their sdk doesn’t give access to all the crap above) to understand how the Os apis are called. Honestly no idea how to get there - someone can code hello world in their sdk and if packaged in a way that’s very opaque building apps for their os becomes hard. Open sourcing whatever is learned helps inspire other to work towards their wants and can share more understanding. 
ultimately, and dangerously, we could potentially find a way to mess with the bootloader and put custom firmware on the watcH itself and that opens up just about everything. Including bricking the watch. Worth it.