Looking for Sabbath-Friendly Garmin App: Screen Always On, No Tracking

So what you're saying is that it's actually possible to do what I'm aiming for—by exporting the settings file to a computer, editing it through a website, and then importing it back to the watch?

If that's the case, and it needs to be done twice a week (before and after Shabbat), that's definitely not trivial. Just trying to understand how realistic this would be in practice.

Why do you want to use a Garmin watch on shabbat? What features that it has, but a $10 watch from decathlon doesn't have would you use on shabbat?

I spent a lot of money in the watch; it looks more luxurious than the Casio watch I bought three years ago for $15, and I would prefer to use only this watch. Besides, I find it really, really strange that it's not possible to disable the functions, and that I can't leave the watch in a specific mode of my choosing.

4441685 said:

So what you're saying is that it's actually possible to do what I'm aiming for—by exporting the settings file to a computer, editing it through a website, and then importing it back to the watch?

If that's the case, and it needs to be done twice a week (before and after Shabbat), that's definitely not trivial. Just trying to understand how realistic this would be in practice.

Well, as I said, if activity tracking is disabled, you can re-enable it by opening the Steps or Calories glance (for example), and answering yes to the watch's prompt to enable activity tracking. So you would "only" need use the website once a week, to disable activity tracking.

This is assuming that FR265 works the same way as FR955 of course (in the sense that the activity tracking setting still exists under the covers, although it's no longer in the UI). 

You would also need to manually disable the optical HR sensor as mentioned. The website could also do this for you, to save time. But you can always disable optical HR yourself.

I could make the website pretty quickly, as I already have one that edits activity FIT files to fix a couple of Garmin bugs. The code to change the setting itself is literally a 5 minute job (I already made a local version that turns off activity tracking and tried it out on my FR955). The bulk of the work is making the website user-friendly (adding the correct text/instructions/error checking for your specific use case.) It would take slightly longer if you also want the website to disable optical HR at the same time.

But I won't do it unless you are interested.

Also, I suppose you could use the backup/restore settings feature in Connect to streamline this process.

e.g.

Initial setup:

1) Back up settings before disabling activity tracking

2) Disable activity tracking (using the website) and disable optical HR (either manually or using the website). Back up this version of settings as well

3) To re-enable tracking, restore the backup from 2)

Regular usage:

4) Back up settings before disabling activity tracking

5) Disable activity tracking by restoring the backup from 2)

6) To re-enable tracking, restore the backup from 4)

I think this would only work if:

- you don't already make automatic backups (as I imagine that older backups would be automatically removed at some point, so you wouldn't be able to keep a single older backup with activity tracking disabled)

- other changes to settings don't need to be preserved when you disable activity tracking

Of course you could always make your own backup of the settings FIT file on your PC (it's just a single file). But I assume the biggest hassle of all of this is the requirement to connect your watch to the PC and manually copy files in the first place.

Yeah I realize all of this is impractical. Maybe I shouldn't have suggested it.