Smartwatch connection on Kompakt

Technical Support
1

I posted this question in another thread but thought I would add it as a new topic for visibility.
Has anyone sideloaded a smartwatch connection app and had it successfully stay alive in the background? I sideloaded the Garmin Connect app, gave it all permissions and excluded it from battery optimization, and it still closes itself after running for about an hour in the background and I lose connection. Does anyone have any suggestions for keeping it alive? I rely on the watch for notifications as I often don’t have the phone in my pocket and miss the notification alerts.

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2

I tried out Garmin Connect as well with my Instinct 2 watch. It didn’t seem to be pushing any text notifications to the watch. While yours was connected, were you getting text and call notifications on the watch?

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3

Yes, I was able to receive notifications while connected. After about an hour the Garmin app seemed to die in the background and the watch disconnected.

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4

Interesting. That would certainly be helpful with the lack of easily accessible notifications on the phone. Perhaps there’s a setting available in the Activity Manager app described in this tutorial to force the app to stay awake. Have you noticed any significant impact on your battery life by keeping bluetooth always on?

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5

I’ll check that out. Thanks for the pointer.
I can’t comment on the battery life as I have used the Kompact for less than a day and immediately sideloaded several apps. I don’t have a good baseline to compare against. I would guess that I could get a couple of days with light usage - well short of what others have reported, but still adequate for my needs.

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6

I decided to try a different watch and see if I had better luck. I dug out my old Withings Steel and got it connected. I don’t want to jinx it, but so far we’re going on 3 hours and the app is still chugging away in the background and I’m getting notifications. Maybe Withings is doing something different with background activities than Garmin is? Whatever the reason, I’m having better luck with this watch.

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