vivoactive 5 10.20 - unstable connection and hung

Well, my watch was solid on Bluetooth until this afternoon when it lost connection again. I called support rather than chatting in. They had me screenshot my Connect screen that showed the watch in my account but not connected to my phone. I also sent some logs off my watch to them. Fingers crossed! I'm happy to update here with what I find out. 

TLDR: call support. The rep I spoke with was asking questions I'd not been asked and sending instructions to send logs. 

I kinda got the root of at least my problems. 

I have a Huawei p30 which has an unsupported and "incompatible" android version. 

I tried it on an iPhone from a college and an company testphone with stock android today and it worked just fine. 

Note that on my p30 also every menu that somehow has to load data or sync up data with the watch is super slow. 

With the other devices it just worked fine.

Ordered a new Google pixel 8 today

Hope it works for you. I'm on a new Pixel 8a though...

Battery draining like crazy too

I assume your watch was working fine before with the old firmware with your current huawei phone?

I too go P30 Pro as well.

That's kind of unacceptable that if your phone is working fine before and the firmware screw it up, you need to get a new phone.

Anyway i have tried reset/restart/delete app/download app etc etc mulitple time, it simply cannot get a stable connection.

I would expect Pixel line should have 0 issue with it. This is deeply disappointing, so getting a new phone may not even fix the issue.

Garmin should provide a way to downgrade the firmware as it was fine before

I started having similar problems with my VA5 and Huawei P30 after the 10.20 update after about a week ago. Before that I had no significant problems at all over the 2 months that I've had my VA5.

What's more annoying, the problem gets worse and worse. At first it was just my watch asking to confirm the 6 digit pairing number to establish connection couple times a day. After about 2 days since the 10.20 update Connect started to forget my watch ever existed linked to my account and I had to pair the watch as if it was completely new product out of the box (choose pairing mode from the VA5 settings and go through the whole setup procedure with Connect). This has to be done at least twice a day + notifications to confirm the 6 digit number still resume. And now the new problem to add to the list: when I have to pair my watch with the phone, most of the time Connect first tells me that establishing connection fails, even when Connect initially finds my VA5. Second try usually works, but syncing data after pairing is SO SLOW or doesn't work at all at first. I have to sync data twice before any data actually transfers to Connect app.

I have done everything suggested by Garmin to fix this. I also contacted CS and they asked for pics and logs, but basicly blamed it on Huawei (still funny that evetything worked just fine before VA5 update though...).

My Huawei P30 has no problems with any other BT device and VA5 has no problem keeping BT connection with Polar H10 chest strap. 

Basically that's it. they upgraded the firmware, break something, then blame it on the phone. 

I tested it further with friend's pixel 7 phone and it behave normally. But it totally unsusable on Huawei P30 which is an officiall Android phone. 

P30 works perfectly with other brand like fitbit, or any bluetooth headset.

And it was working 2 weeks ago, until they upgrade the firmware.

It doesn't work normally on a Pixel. I'm on an 8a and had 5 or 6 disconnects yesterday and woke up tomir disconnected today.