Alternative for Garmin Fit

The Garmin Fit app can still work offline. This means that the activity won't be sent to Garmin Connect automatically, but is still recorded. If you have a rooted android phone, then you can extract the activity fit file from the phone's storage and send it manually to Garmin Connect.

And if the above is not an option for you, then you can use any of the multiple 3rd party apps, that record activities.

The lack a "record activity" feature in Connect is just plain stupidity.

Garmin is focussed on devices. Why would you expect Garmin to provide a free service for people who do not choose to buy their devices? Garmin Connect is a free service for Garmin device users to analyse and store their activity data. There are plenty of other options available that will allow you to record activities without having a device.

You can use a Tapariik (it's free) to transfer your Garmin Connect activities to most of the other freely available sites and then start using their free service.

Correction on my previous post - Garmin Fit used to work up until a year ago - I guess that's when Garmin changed their Connect interface and API I suppose.

Thanks for both of your posts. Yes, I get it, Garmin is in it to make money, why provide a way to track your simple recreational activities (walking/jogging/bike) on your phone that you have on you at all time, instead they will make you buy a device. It's too bad, and my point is not to get into a long discussion here, but it's very dissappointing.

I have a Garmin watch, I've had 3 generations of their watches and have used them on "real" workouts (I have a lot of other Garmin products as well); but for something recreational I expect to be able to use my phone for it, and for free. Garmin fit did that. Having to manually upload the output from Garmin Fit to Connect is pretty pointless, as pointed out, other apps can do this. It's really too bad.

Re other apps:
>some 3rd party apps have a "Garmin connection" where supposedly push data into Connect - none that boast this feature actually work
>Tapiriik doesn't work, I have tried from Strava and Edomono and both give me the same error "Garmin Connect: There was a problem indexing your activities on Garmin Connect, so no activities will be uploaded to Garmin Connect."

Cheers

Garmin Fit was removed from the Play store quite a few years ago. They had stopped supporting it years before that. It's no surprise that it's not a satisfactory solution.

There was also the free Wahoo Fitness app that had a direct link to Connect for years but that was also dropped at one point. It's possible that there could be an export feature or tapiriik or fitnesssyncer link from Wahoo that could work.