2025 and we still can't select shoes from the watch

Gear is the forgotten part of Garmin Connect.

It should be possible to associate each piece of Gear with an Activity e.g. "Road bike" not just a class of activity e.g. "Cycling" to address your complaint.  In this way you wouldn't have to do anything after an activity, you just select the activity that uses the particular shoe before your run.

There is currently a weird error within GC web where if you have edited the Gear in an activity, and then press the arrow key to move to the next activity and select add/remove gear the Gear from the previous activity shows as selected (even though it isn't) and must be deselected and selected again to save properly.

Yeah and the sad part is that it takes few hours to code a script that does that automatically but... Garmin API isn't public for personal use you have to a company... 

Coros does that
https://support.coros.com/hc/en-us/articles/30206047249556-Gear-Tracking

Not just that, but the gear selection UI/UX in the Connect app is terrible:

1) When changing gear, the list of gear to be selected appears in random order. This is very annoying if you're changing gear for multiple activities in a row. Funnily enough this isn't a problem on the website, which has a completely different UI for gear selection

2) In the activity Gear tab, you can only change gear if no gear is currently selected. Otherwise, you have to tap on 3 dots menu and select Add or Remove Gear. It's an annoying and counterintuitive extra step. If I'm already on the Gear tab, why isn't there any easy way to change gear in all cases?

3) When selecting shoes in the Gear tab, selecting a pair of shoes doesn't de-select shoes that are already selected, meaning that both pairs of shoes will be selected until you tap on the previous pair of shoes. This is ridiculous, as there's no point in selecting multiple pairs of shoes for a running activity: even if you actually wore different pairs of shoes in one long activity, there's no way to split up the activity mileage amongst the pairs in Connect - both pairs would receive the total activity mileage, so it would be completely pointless.

Even if users still wanted to select multiple shoes, I'd argue that this is an extremely rare use case, and it should not be the default (and only) behaviour. They could have a button, checkbox or toggle that enables multiple-selection mode - I bet nobody would ever press it.

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2) and 3) mean that there's always unnecessary taps if you have a default pair of shoes (as many will, I'm guessing) and you want to change an activity to use a different pair of shoes. e.g. Say you have 2 or more pairs of shoes that you rotate through.)

It's been this way forever, I gave Garmin feedback about it several different ways, and I'm not surprised nothing has changed.

In contrast, Strava's UX for selecting shoes is streamlined and intuitive:

- a simple drop-down is displayed with shoes that are always in the same order (alphabetical)

- if you select one pair of shoes, the previously selected pair is de-selected

- whether shoes are already selected or not, it's the same method to change shoes

- as a bonus, the gear selection drop-down has an entry to add a completely new pair of shoes to the gear list. This isn't possible with Garmin's gear selection UI: if you want to manage the gear list in any way, it's a lot of taps to go to a completely different page

Garmin doesn't care about the little things, so it's no surprise to me that many Garmin-using runners do not use Connect at all (they use Strava for everything). A lot of ppl I talk to, especially non-techie ppl, say that Connect is too complicated. To be fair, some of them were happy with the app's home screen redesign.

Right now I can't even open running activities in the Connect app - the app keeps returning an error: "Data could not be loaded for this activity". I'm not even surprised.

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PubBike said:

It should be possible to associate each piece of Gear with an Activity e.g. "Road bike" not just a class of activity e.g. "Cycling" to address your complaint.

PubBike said:

In this way you wouldn't have to do anything after an activity, you just select the activity that uses the particular shoe before your run.

Some runners rotate shoes to prevent injury [wearing the same model of shoes all the time subjects you to the same forces repeatedly, which can lead to injury]. Having different shoes for different types of activities isn't the only use case for shoe selection.

Runners might also use different shoes for different activity types (race, long run, workout, etc.) but either they don't want to classify their runs in Connect, or Connect may not have the exact classification they need. e.g. Connect doesn't have a classification for long runs or for workouts (the closest is "track workout")

Yeah, it's a mess indeed. I never managed to add Gear via Connect mobile App. I've been only using "add to all activities of this type" checkbox. 

I'm not using Strava but i guess it only allows manual selection there are no automatic assignment rules or something ? But maybe at least I can use their API normally to write some automation as opposed to Garmin that is business only 

Piotr said:

I'm not using Strava but i guess it only allows manual selection there are no automatic assignment rules or something

You already found what you're looking for but for the benefit of anyone else reading, much like Garmin, Strava allows you to select "default sports" for pairs of shoes. In Strava's case, these sports are: Run, Virtual Run, Trail Run, Hike, and Walk

Each sport can only be assigned to one pair of shoes (obviously), but one pair of shoes can have 1 or more default sports.

(The wording of the feature - default sports - isn't great imo. You're really setting a pair of shoes as the default shoes for a given sport, but ofc that's hard to describe succinctly.)

I will say that Garmin has one advantage over Strava here: it allows you to track shoes for sports other than running, walking and hiking, such as basketball.