another bug: Hotkey: widgets during Activity... unexpected behavior?

are you running the beta? If not have you tired it to see if that improves things? 

not running beta, but may consider it in a few days. Garmin is sending me a replacement watch due to button issues (hardware) related to my current watch.

Just out of curiosity, does it turn the GPS back on when you return to your activity?

for the walk activity, it ultimately did after maybe 20-30 seconds (it might be a bit quicker but it showed zero pace for least 20-30 seconds). for the bike activity, i potentially didn't give it enough time as i was flummoxed enough that i hit start and stop and the restarting the activity got the GPS going very quickly.*

*i was flummoxed because my daughter was set on finishing 9 miles for the ride so i was bummed that we were missing distance during the time i was using my widget and then seeing it not accumulate distance when i resumed the activity screen. i'm sure we lost at least 0.25miles but thankfully she accepted the fact that my watch only showed 8.9mi at the end of the ride ;) 

anyone else have this issue? i just got an email from Garmin on my ticket asking me to submit videos of this happening which i did (i injured my back, so it was a very awkward exercise to carefully walk, handle the watch and record with my phone).

i had hoped they would have solved this in FW3.07, but that is not the case. (and i also tried with factory watch face to make sure my connect IQ WF wasn't causing the issue)

following up myself, Garmin is now claiming this is working the way it should... hmmm... that's not what happened on my 935 as far as i remember...

Our escalation and engineering teams have determined that the Hot Key function is working as designed. Hot Key is supposed to be for skipping you back to the watch face at any point in the menu from any screen. It will work while you're recording an activity, but it will disrupt the GPS connection. 

That's silly.  Admittedly I haven't used a hotkey to go to the watch face in awhile, but I do recall doing something like that on my Fenix 3 way-back-when.  If I am correct, it had a long-press back return to home screen (and the default watchface would light "GPS" to indicate GPS was still on in the background).  This nicely allowed widget uses during activity without messing up the activity recording.

Edit to add:

This explanation (along with the Alarm sorting comment) makes me fear a quick lack of support for this watch.  Both of these seem more like accidentally broken experiences that ae now claimed as-designed (unless either can offer an explanation as to why the new way is intentional and somehow better).

i agree that it's silly because i know that i was able to use Widgets midactivity on my 935. i just don't have it handy to prove it to myself.

i hope your fear is incorrect, but i knew going in that there is the potential for this to be an orphaned watch. yet, the features checked all the boxes, and i assume it won't be orphaned any sooner than the 945...but potentially, at the worst, we may only see 1 year of "real support" for the device.

(i agree that the Alarm sorting experience doesn't make sense at all)

one more follow-up i had with Garmin which really surprises me:

I have confirmed with our escalation team that this is not something engineering and de will fix as the feature is working as designed. We did test this internally on a Forerunner 935 and was able to replicate the same thing as the Forerunner 945 LTE when using a HotKey in the middle of an activity. We are leaving your case open as an experience issue to track how often this impacts Garmin users. 

that is not consistent with my past experience. the only thing i could think of and suggest to Garmin is that i never upgraded beyond FW13.30 because that was so stable with rock solid battery life and i didn't want to mess with something that worked so well since none of the newer FW offered anything important to me.

i think i may try to crowd source this issue on the forum to see if people on the 935/945 forums to see if my recollection is common experience or perhaps Garmin nixed this nice feature in more recent firmware versions.

I experienced dropout of GPS and external HR when I accessed widgets on my 935 today. This is definitely not how it has worked in the past and a serious regression in functionality.