watch-app recorded session switches from Hike to Run in the middle of the activity

I got a strange report form a user with fr255. He starts to record a Hike activity using my Hiker App and somehow in the middle it changes to Run. And this happens to him almost every hike. He sent me screenshots from before and after, and now also a full activity with permission to share it here:

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/21031646087

What I can see is that indeed the activity session was recorded by Hiker App, and in the first 23 minutes the graphs are consistent with that:

- steps / km, steps / hour, GPS accuracy, battery % graphs have data

- activity type is recorded as Hike

But after 23 minutes somehow it looks like it magically switched to a Running activity:

- there's stride length, Power: Watts graphs

- the steps / km, steps / hour, GPS accuracy, battery % have no more data (straight horizontal line)

Also the Connect IQ session data summary is missing, even though the app does record them together with the record data that we see in the beginning of the graphs.

ChatGPT recommended him to turn off MoveIQ which he did, but it didn't fix the issue.

Does anybody have any idea what's going on? What can I do? What can he try? To me it looks like another strange Garmin bug that probably happens to 1 in a million users.

flowstate 3 days ago

flocsy🤠 said:
ChatGPT recommended him to turn off MoveIQ which he did, but it didn't fix the issue.

Given that Move IQ doesn't have anything to do with timed activities - except in the case of Venu/Vivoactive where it can automatically start a timed activity - I wouldn't expect it to have any effect at all.

flocsy🤠 said:
What I can see is that indeed the activity session was recorded by Hiker App,

It also shows that the recorded sport type is still hiking, unless the user changed it manually after the fact.

Can you ask the user to send you a copy of the original FIT file, so you can look for additional clues? Out of curiosity I tried exporting the FIT file using a script I cooked up, but predictably the download service returned a 403 error.

I did notice that according to the pace chart, from 21:03 to 22:48, the user either stopped moving or moved very slowly (slow enough to count as "infinite pace" or "0 speed", meaning the corresponding points are so low they don't even appear on the pace chart). For the same period of time, there is no cadence data (it's not 0, but absent). We can also see that HR dips steadily and sharply [*] starting 19:30 until it hits a local minimum at 22:15, then it starts to rise. [*] but not so sharply (e.g. almost vertical drop) that we can say the activity was paused at this point

Shortly after 22:48, running-specific data such as stride length begins to be recorded.