[nnutter]

I didn't realize this. Just verified on my Forerunner 965, if I put my phone in Airplane Mode, turn off Wi-Fi, leave Bluetooth on, then Garmin Connect disabled the sync button and says "No Internet connection".

[mcintyre1994]

This is why when Garmin Connect has outages you can’t sync the watch to the phone, it’s a pretty bad architecture. It should sync to the phone without internet or any services and then use internet to sync from the phone to the cloud.

[DebtDeflation]

It's utterly bizarre. I was impacted by that outage a year or so ago and they claimed that they were going provide offline syncing in the future but I still don't see it. It seems the flow is Watch ->(Bluetooth)-> Phone ->(LTE/WiFi) -> Garmin Cloud ->(LTE/WiFi) Phone. There's no reason for the Cloud step other than that Garmin wants your data but the sync won't work without it.

[alt227]

In my experience, airplane mode also disables Bluetooth. You would just need to turn wifi off to test this.

[jjani]

IME it very much doesn't. Bluetooth headphones/earphones in the airplane while on airplane mode are now part of near every flight.