13.22 bug: airplane mode is turned on, both the bluetooth headphones and ant+ HR belt is still connected

Back from activity so will turn it back onto Airplane and see - immediately BT is off. What is most interesting is how so many of us have completely different experiences with the same action on the watch.  

What FW is on the watch (sorry if I missed that in all the posts? I am on 14.13 currently) Also did you do a soft reset recently at all (holding in light button until the watch turns off completely, then restarting after a few seconds) Sometimes that seems to sort minor issues after a FW update.

GPS has not for many years been part of the Airplane mode, but linked to the acitivty type. For example indoor swimming = GPS OFF, Openwater swim = GPS ON - This applies to most Garmin watches since Garmin Fenix 5+

I am not going to comment more on what is wireless :) - But I can comment om this.

To My Knowledge the decision was orginally that if you start an activity like RUN where you are using an external heartrate monitor (Bluetooth). Then it will try to use that sensor, but only on that activity. This means that If you do not generally add a bluetooth devices in settings - but on activity settings it should turn off bluetooth when the activity is finished.


You probably remember the issues where the watch used a LOT of battery. The reason for that was that it it did not disconnect the bluetooth sensor when the activity was finished.

Also a few months back there was an issue on android devices that after a sync using garmin connect - the bluetooth connection wasy not removed - hence the battery-usage.  This was fixed in a garmin connect update.

A few months back in one of the previous FW releases there was a bug that was related to Android users only (High battery usage) because the garmin connect app didn't release the bluetooth connection after a sync. 

Garmin might have re-introduced this problem if you are still experience high battery usage.

Yip I  see if I activate Run as example whilst in Airplane mode BT etc . although strangely enough not ANT for the HRM :-) , and exiting the activity then does not shut off BT , although out of activity and in Airplane mode still.

Oh life is such fun all these little nuances within things :-)

Not that i ever saw the need to use Airplane mode as of now but interesting to see what happens... 

How I understood it from last years developer conference (or perhaps is was from the year before that) - the rule was that ANT+ is always active because ANT+ can only receive data not send anything.

Also in the API there is no option of turning ANT+ off.

( https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/api-docs/Toybox/Ant.html )

I had this problem since 3 version back now (14:13) but seems getting worse, or maybe I'm giving him more attention then before. I had tried a soft reset, i'll retry it and see what happen.
This morning it turned ON bluetooth after a few hours I was awake...

I can confirm it turn on bluetooth when I start an activity even if I said I don't want livetracking (in my case I don't have any external bluetooth device associated) so the only things requiring bluetooth is livetracking.

This can be the problem for the battery usage, but what is worse is that it turn ON and OFF bluetooth without I touch anything