My Garmin watch did not sync activities with the Garmin Connect iOS app upon returning home from a week of travels. It did sync my steps from the day I landed, my sleep that night, and steps the following day. It just failed to pick up my running, hiking, and other activities logged when I was abroad.

After a little searching and filtering out obvious tips (make sure Bluetooth is on and paired), I found the key steps and fixed it.

How to get the Garmin Connect iOS app to sync Garmin watch activities that are seemingly being ignored:

1. unpair watch from phone (iOS Settings > Bluetooth > (i) next to watchname > "Forget This Device")
2. hard restart watch (e.g. hold down backlight button on a fenix 7S Pro to turn it off)
3. restart Garmin Connect app (force quit and re-open)
4. re-pair watch to phone
5. wait a while for all the activities to sync

It seemed to sync hikes and walks first, then runs, roughly in reverse chronological order.

The syncing spinner indicator in Garmin Connect took a while and prematurely completed the progress circle ○, and kept “spinning” the arrows 🔁 inside the circle for many minutes.

Note: having some idea how software is written and handles queues etc., I highly recommend fixing any syncing problems like this before recording another activity in your watch. There is a chance that the software bug(s) that caused the syncing problem in the first place may inadvertently only pick up the latest activity and make it even harder to recover or sync the previously unsynced activities.

I had no luck with web searching, e.g. for
* why is Garmin ios app not syncing recent activities from my Garmin watch
and similar queries.

All “AI Overview” results were useless.

Only after going to https://support.garmin.com/ and entering my watch model name and number did I somehow find this article:
* Garmin Connect App: Device Is Paired but Not Connecting to App: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=9BcXLSQ4A22gasLarkUvH6

Which while not the exact problem I was having (my watch did connect, and sync two days of steps and one night of sleep), it felt close enough to be worth reading.

Steps 3 and 4 in the article gave the key steps to try (though I split step 4 into two parts, and in the middle only restarted my watch, there was no reason to restart my phone)

That article linked to another article on "How Do I Restart My Garmin Device?" which I also found useful: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=A6gOR1U2zDAFqmJVdap6k6

Hopefully by blogging this, the next person that has a similar problem (my guess is the Garmin Connect Android app works similarly) can more quickly find this solution and key steps by searching the open web.

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Jippie die ersten 5 des Jahres 🫠
Call me lausigste Läuferin der Welt.
#run #runslow #slowrunners #garmin #garminwatch

Cheers!!! #garminwatch #instinct2XSolar