Garmin's 'Year in Review' Is Perplexing, Like the Rest of Its Subscription Service

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Garmin has released an end-of-year summary of users’ stats, Spotify Wrapped-style. But it’s only available to people who pay for Garmin Connect+, the new paid subscription that Garmin has offered since March of this year. I’ll show you what’s inside the Year in Review, and give you my thoughts on how the subscription service has weathered its first almost-year. Spoiler: The more things Garmin adds, the less they seem to know what they're doing.

What’s in the Year in Review? 

Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Garmin

Garmin’s Year in Review feature shows you a bunch of cute visuals of your activity throughout the year. For each metric, there is usually a summary or a total, followed by a graph showing that metric for each calendar month (January through December) with the “best” month for that metric highlighted. Sometimes a particular workout was called out for that metric, such as your longest run. The metrics included:

• Total steps

• Sleep score average

• Body Battery average daily high

• Number of activities, and your most common types

• Total activity time

• Total activity distance

• Total activity ascent

• Total activity calories (put in terms of “slices of chocolate cake” for some reason)

• Badges earned

• Personal records earned

There are shareable cards for each, so it’s certainly fulfilling the function of a yearly recap, but it’s a bit boring to page through. I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care about my average Body Battery, and it’s not exactly a revelation that I did more gym workouts than bike rides. Perhaps this will get more polished in future years.

Your Year in Review says more about Garmin than about you

More companies than ever are offering an annual summary this year, and it seems like each of them is having a little identity crisis. Is the summary meant to provide free marketing when you share the screenshots with your friends? Engage you more deeply with the algorithm, to encourage you to consume more content? Or is it just a reward for being a loyal customer? 

Garmin, by making theirs a premium feature, doesn’t seem to be prioritizing any of the above. I see two things going on here: They're competing with Strava, and grappling with what it means to exist as a hardware company in a subscription-based world. 

The Strava part is easiest to understand. Strava offers a premium subscription, and the main draw is that it comes with mapping tools and training analytics. People may gripe about having to pay to see their spot on a leaderboard or build a running route, but this model fundamentally works because people like and want those features. Strava’s “Year in Sport” is a premium feature as well, but people don’t subscribe just to get Year in Sport. It’s a little perk, not the whole point. 

Comparing Garmin’s recap to Strava’s, Strava’s feels more cohesive. There are fewer cards in the carousel, and they’re more relevant to things I care about. I get my activities and distance in the same card, find out how long I’ve kept my weekly streak (over a year!), see the days I was active, get reminded of one highlight run (definitely a memorable one), see my PRs for all the major distances, and get a shout-out on the one QOM and couple of Local Legend titles I earned. It’s easier for Strava to do this well because their platform is tailored to people with specific goals: to run or bike more and faster. Garmin tries harder to be everything to everybody. 

And then there’s the question of what Garmin is doing here. It’s always been a hardware company, starting out with GPS devices (back when “GPS device” was a standalone product category) and eventually becoming a maker of sports watches as well as gadgets like bike computers and boat navigation systems. The company seems to be having trouble finding its place in today's subscription-based world. I appreciate that it isn't removing features from existing products, but that makes me wonder what the point of Connect+ is supposed to be.

Garmin’s Connect+ subscription doesn’t seem to be the paywall people are afraid of (or the cash cow Garmin is probably hoping for)

Garmin has always been a hardware company at heart, but that model has been harder and harder to fit with the modern wearables market. Now that we all have smartphones, many of the features we expect from a Garmin watch are really features of a phone app. So to keep selling watches in different pricing tiers, Garmin ties specific features to the hardware you’ve bought. You’ll only get a “training status” in the app if you’ve paired a training status-capable watch, for example. (The Forerunner 265 counts, but not the 165.)

I have to imagine Garmin execs wish they could start over, make just a few physical devices, and sell software features as subscription tiers. Everything in 2025 seems to be sold on a subscription basis or with some features paywalled behind a premium tier. So of course Garmin tried to move into that space.

Garmin has long sold subscriptions for some devices, but those were always specific things like satellite messaging or high-definition marine charts, where the purpose and the cost made sense. Garmin Connect+, which launched this year, is basically a subscription for software features of the phone app, not a device. 

That’s good for Garmin users—no actual features of the watches get paywalled this way. Whatever features your Forerunner 265 had when you bought it, you get to keep those. New watches don’t seem to be missing any features (yet)—if anything, new releases like the Forerunner 570 and the Venu 4 seem to be adding features to justify their higher prices. 

But that leaves the Connect+ subscription without anything vital to offer. I’ve gone through and listed all the features you get, and I think the only one that’s really worthwhile is mirroring data to your phone, which both Apple and Coros will give you for free. The rest are all “huh?” features, like unlocking special badges or gaining access to an AI feature that is surely the least useful of all fitness apps’ AI features (and that’s really saying something). 

Garmin seems to be hoping that people will upgrade to the subscription because of its cool amazing attractive features, while carefully avoiding putting anything useful or essential in the subscription. That doesn’t seem to be a tightrope they can actually walk, unless they come up with new app features that don’t fit into their hardware models, but are actually useful and interesting. Features worth paying for are expensive to build, which explains why Garmin Trails is a dud so far—it’s just an empty shell of a service that users are supposed to fill with data, eventually, I guess. 

Year in Review must have been easy to build, but it doesn’t give us anything worth paying for. Garmin has been advertising the Year in Review to non-subscribers, suggesting that we pay for a subscription to access it. I just don’t think it’s working, Garmin.

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