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Garmin Fenix 7 - no music controls for phone

I upgraded from a Fenix 6X Pro to a Fenix 7 Pro Solar (no wifi).

I am no longer able to control music playing on my phone.

When I open the music control widget, I can see the Play, Skip, and three dots for the additional menu.

If I click Play, I am prompted to connect headphones. When I skip that, I get the message "No Music. Connect to your computer, and use Garmin Express to add music."

Under the three dot options, I have no other option other than "Phone", not "Control Phone" like I've seen elsewhere on the forum.

I am running the latest software on the watch, and the latest Garmin Connect app. All phone permissions are also enabled. I understand I can't download Spotify or other music app due to the no wifi model, but does that also limit the ability to control music on my phone?

Is there another option that I may be missing or is this a software bug?

  • Have you set your phone as music provider in the settings? Should work the same as on the Enduro 2 shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRDv2z2PkaI

  • I tried to go through the settings as in the video but my options are different.

    When I go though the menu and click music, I have no option for "music provider", the only sub-menus I can see are "Headphones" and "Audio"

  • That's weird. I can only suggest to contact Garmin support then. 

  • Hold the down button until the music screen pulls up, it doesn't matter which part of the music widget pops up. Then hold the Menu button and hit music providers. Then there will be an option to control your phone in there. Once you click that "control phone", that screen will now be the screen that pulls up when you hold down from any other screen.

  • That's weird.

    Not to state the obvious but the absence of the music provider setting is probably due to the fact that it’s a no-wifi model. Looking at it from the other direction, Garmin watches which don’t support music don’t support music providers (or Wi-Fi), only the ability to control your phone.

    In this case, the bug seems to be that the music provider option was removed from the base Fenix 7 firmware (which does have wi-fi and music) in order to create the no-wifi Fenix 7 model, but the underlying provider was accidentally locked into “music on device” (My Music), rather than Control Phone (despite parts of the UI suggesting otherwise). It could also be that the code for the 2 providers was merged (but not properly), although it’s not clear why Garmin would need to merge the 2 rather than just using Control Phone..

    This is actually a very plausible scenario to me, assuming that Fenix 7 (no-wifi) was indeed created by taking the base Fenix 7 firmware and mostly deleting a bunch of stuff, without full testing.

    Is there another option that I may be missing or is this a software bug?

    Was this ever resolved for you via support or a firmware update?

    We could try to hack the settings file on the watch to force the music provider to be Control Phone, despite the absence of the UI for the music provider option. It might not work, especially given that the existing provider seems to be a weird mashup of Control Phone and My Music.

    If you want to try, you could connect your watch to a computer using the USB cable and copy the \GARMIN\Settings\settings.fit file off the device. (Close Garmin Express first, and if you’re using Mac, you’ll needopenmtp to access the file system.)

    Then zip settings.fit up and post it here (or post a dropbox link or whatever).