Venu Swimming and Custom workout debacle

I have recently bought a Venu 3S as my first Garmin device and honestly I'm so frustrated this might be my last Garmin device.

I would just like to know why does the Venu not have the ability to upload custom Swim workouts? Is it a hardware limitation? I've looked at countless forum threads surrounding this subject but Garmin has not once given an explanation as to what's stopping them from allowing this series to have Swim workouts.

As someone pointed out in another thread, the fact that the watch supports Swimming as an activitiy and also supports loading custom workouts leads any sane person to believe they could load custom Swimming workouts, and if that's not the case it should be clearly stated somewhere in the advertisement unless Garmin wants to intentionlly mislead customers.

This has been an issue for years and several customers have reported feeling misled and still nothing concrete was made to remedy the situation.

I encourage everyone reading this post to request this functionality in their Share Ideas page and keep bugging Garmin about it, let's see if with enough noise they do something about it (I highly doubt, but that's as much as we can do right now). In the meantime, let me start looking for other options...

  • well, the same way venu3 supports hiking, but does not allow you to pause your hike for longer than 5 mins. A lot of hikers do an indoor lunch pause, and pausing the workout is an obvious part of the "support hiking", but no.

    Anyways, the answer to your question: the limitation is not technical, this is marketing and product strategy - if you want to avoid strange random limitations here and there - you have to buy a fenix.    

  • That's what I've seen online, but honestly all of this makes me not want to be a Garmin customer anymore, regardless of the actual quality of their products.

    Thanks for chiming in!

  • It's really a bizarre decision to leave it out on such an expensive watch. Same with custom workouts for things like indoor rowing.

    Whoever was responsible for the V3 swimming feature seems to have a special dislike for the sport by also limiting it to a single data screen.

  • I encourage everyone reading this post to request this functionality in their Share Ideas page and keep bugging Garmin about it, let's see if with enough noise they do something about it

    That will not help, this same thing and user requests are repeated since Vivoactive 4 and first Venu. Garmin just ignores those request. 

    the limitation is not technical, this is marketing and product strategy

    Correct.