When I look at the Glances on my Fenix 7x Pro Solar there are red exclamation marks by the Calendar and Notifications. I'm pretty sure that these mean that the watch isn't connected to my phone, however it is and all notifications come through to my watch instantly. If I open Connect on the phone they go away, but as soon as I close Connect they reappear.
Does anybody have a fix to remove them? I'm running the latest iOS and Fenix softwares.
Does anybody have a fix to remove them?
Personally I would ignore the red exclamation marks as long as whatever functionality you're interested in still works.
I do agree it's silly that notifications still work when Connect is closed (but the device is connected to the phone), but the widget complains that a connection is unavailable. In general I think the UI / error messages sometimes tend to blur the line between "phone is connected, but Connect is closed" and "phone is disconnected", so it can be hard to tell whether you actually need Connect to be open or not. I realize it's intentional, as Garmin would just prefer that you keep Connect open all the time in order to simplify things.
Some people suspect having it that way causes battery drain issues on either/both watch and phone
Define "issues".
Logically, if having the app running in the background does something to fix this problem, the app must be doing *something* (like communicating with the watch), and there must be *some* additional battery drain. If the watch and app are constantly communicating, then the watch is syncing with the app at regular intervals, and surely this doesn't happen for free.
The real question is whether it's acceptable battery drain that the user notices or cares about.
I can say that I notice that additional battery drain on my Garmin watch, even just by having bluetooth enabled during a run without having the phone connected (I leave my phone at home during runs.) I turn off bluetooth on my watch whenever possible (anytime I go for a run).
Here's my iphone battery usage for the last 24 hours:
Not very scientific ofc, but the background usage of Connect is 3X that of the foreground usage. Sure, it may mean nothing since I don't keep the app open 24/7, and the usage says nothing about the total time the app was in the background, but it seems like a pretty high number at first glance.
Anyone could evaluate this a tad more scientifically ofc, but I just prefer to close / disable certain things that I'm not actively using.
