Pre-Export Review & Approval for Third-Party Data Sharing

Dear Garmin Connect Product Team,

I would like to propose an enhancement to Garmin Connect that improves data quality, user control, and professional workflow integration: a pre-export review and approval step for third-party data sharing.

Background

Garmin Connect increasingly serves as the authoritative system of record for training and health data, while many users rely on third-party platforms for coaching, analysis, and long-term planning. Currently, activities are exported automatically to connected services immediately upon saving, without an opportunity for user validation or correction.

Problem Statement

In practice, users often need to:

  • Verify or correct activity classification (e.g., indoor vs outdoor, workout vs race)

  • Adjust activity titles, notes, or tags

  • Resolve duplicate recordings

  • Confirm data integrity before it becomes permanent in downstream systems

Once exported, errors propagate to third-party platforms and must be corrected repeatedly — or cannot be corrected at all — undermining confidence in Garmin Connect as the system of record.

Proposed Feature

Introduce an optional, user-configurable “review before sharing” workflow for third-party integrations.

Example behavior:

  • Activity is saved in Garmin Connect as usual

  • Activity enters a “Pending Export” state

  • User can review and edit:

    • Activity name and classification

    • Sport type or modality

    • Notes or tags

    • Inclusion or exclusion from specific third-party services

  • Upon approval, data is released to selected platforms

This could be configured:

  • Per activity

  • Per service

  • Or as a default preference with manual override

Benefits

  • Improves data accuracy across connected platforms

  • Reduces administrative cleanup for coached and structured training workflows

  • Supports advanced, professional, and research-oriented users

  • Reinforces Garmin Connect as the authoritative data hub

  • Aligns with modern expectations around data governance and consent

Closing

This proposal does not aim to slow or complicate casual user workflows, but to provide intentional control for users who depend on accurate downstream data.

Thank you for your consideration.

Respectfully,
Michael

Top Replies

All Replies

  • Adjust activity titles, notes, or tags
    Once exported, errors propagate to third-party platforms and must be corrected repeatedly — or cannot be corrected at all — undermining confidence in Garmin Connect as the system of record.

    Well, speaking of activity titles (in Connect) specifically:

    - many 3rd party services which sync activities from Garmin, like Strava, don't even use the activity titles from Connect

    - the activity title isn't in the exported FIT file at all

    - runalyze, a 3rd party service which does use the title from Connect, actually shows the latest activity title in Connect. You can change the activity title in Connect whenever you want, as many times as you want, and the corresponding activity in runalyze will reflect the new title. To me this suggests that the activity title isn't exported one time, but it's probably retrieved on the fly by runalyze.

    I get where this feature request is coming from, but I think your chatgpt writeup got a few deets wrong.

    professional, and research-oriented users

    If you're doing something that important, wouldn't you just build your own script to export FIT files? You could even build a nice UI around it.

    Just ask chatgpt to do it for you.

    tags

    But Garmin activities don't have tags? Unless you mean something like event type, but I don't think any 3rd party services use that, do they?

    Once exported, errors propagate to third-party platforms and must be corrected repeatedly — or cannot be corrected at all — undermining confidence in Garmin Connect as the system of record.

    You didn't say anything about editing activity data itself, but for the record, even if you were to somehow edit activity data in Connect before it was exported to a 3rd party service, I don't think the edits would make it the 3rd party service anyway, since it would probably be the original FIT file that's exported. (Just an educated guess based on the fact that editing activity data never changes the FIT file that's manually exported.)

  • BTW, the next time you ask AI to write up a feature proposal for you, please ask to make it brief, without all that bloated redundant filling. It is a pain to have to read through it in order to understand what you actually ask for.