Garmin needs to do better - Mijndert Stuij

Garmin needs to do better

June 18, 2026

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about my new Garmin Forerunner 570 and how it compared to my previous 255. I partly bought it for some new features and metrics, but also because I was experiencing some rather annoying bugs on the 255. Chief of which was the fact that my alarm wouldn't go off most of the time. The problem followed me from a Forerunner 255 to the 570.

Now imagine you have a family who all like sleeping in, and you have this weird hobby which makes you get out of bed at ungodly hours to go running. Imagine you set up an alarm on your Garmin watch for 5:30 AM. You set the alarm to repeat every day and you turn the sound off so it will only buzz on your wrist, as to not wake up your entire family. What do you expect will happen? You expect the alarm to go off every single day at 5:30 AM exactly, right?

Expectations and reality don't often meet in Garminland however.

What actually happens is that the alarm goes off once, the day after you set it. Then, if you're lucky, it also goes off the next day. But only if you're really lucky. It didn't go off, you missed your window to go running. So you recreate the alarm, it goes off again the following day, but it doesn't the day after that. So you go on the internet and look for other fools who use this alarm feature. You end up on the official Garmin forum where you're then gaslighted into thinking you must have dismissed the alarm while asleep. That sounds reasonable enough, so you just carry on trying to get this alarm to go off reliably using some other tips and tricks from the same forum.

However, nothing helps. Even resetting the entire watch makes the alarm work for a while, but breaks not long after.

About a week ago I woke up before my alarm was supposed to go off. I sat there, looking at my Garmin watch, waiting for the alarm that on the screen said it would go off. It didn't, right there in front of me I got my proof that I don't in fact dismiss the alarm in my sleep.

This entire tirade is about a feature that shouldn't be important, but it is to me. I genuinely don't understand how an alarm could be this unreliable. We have the technology, we have this figured out elsewhere. We're not doing orbital calculations here.

You know what really broke the camel's back and prompted me to complain write about it? This morning my alarm didn't go off, and the watch had the audacity to tell me I had a terrible night's sleep. Actually, I had a great night's sleep – I slept so well in fact that I was psyched to go running after a short hiatus. I'm energized, feel like I haven't slept better in a long long while.

And this whole charade with the alarm being unreliable is far from the only fault with this watch and its software. Sometimes the screen becomes completely unresponsive and doesn't turn on. I know the OS is still running and responding to input because when I use the side buttons I can hear the beeps when starting and pausing a workout.

I use Garmin's Daily Suggested Workouts feature all the time, and I have Training Load guide me into injury free running. I use basically all the data that's available to me, and there's a lot, to become a better runner. And I am becoming a better runner because of this Garmin watch. But the issues are starting to become so annoying that I'm thinking that I'd rather have something reliable but with less functionality and data, than to have this increasingly unreliable Garmin watch with all its useful data.

I know an Apple Watch is reliable but I'd spend another €150/year on some subscription to get some functionality back that Garmin offers out of the box. Not to mention the hit in battery life. I can move to Suunto or Coros but I'm also reading and hearing some not-so-good stories about those.

I'm 38, I have a family and a demanding job and other responsibilities. Increasingly, I just need things to work and get out of the way so I can get on with whatever I'm doing. I however also don't want to spend a long time looking for an alternative to this Garmin watch. I don't want to buy into a different ecosystem, I don't want to learn a new watch, I don't want to lose access to all this data.

The thing is though, with all these annoying issues that keep popping up, the scale starts tipping towards me wanting to throw money at the problem and getting something else, just so that the technology can get out of the way again. I'm not quite there yet, I think, but I will soon. Unless Garmin starts doing better.

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