Almost a year ago, I was fielding a very full inbox, as people were emailing, commenting and posting in droves about Garmin‘s then-new Connect+ launch.
If you’re not familiar, Connect+ is a premium tier layered on top of Garmin’s existing Connect+ platform, the excellent companion app to the best Garmin watches. More than a place to view your stats, Garmin Connect is a training planner, a gear tracker, a lifestyle logging journal, and much more.
Garmin Connect+ introduced several new features, including Active Intelligence, Garmin’s AI advisory service that offers contextual commentary on your workouts and recovery scores. It also offered an improved LiveTrack service, a Performance Dashboard that allowed you to view your historic data, exclusive badges, and several other small quality-of-life improvements and features.
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For this, Garmin asks $6.99 / £6.99 / AU$12 per month or $69.99 / £69.99 / AU$120 annually, with a one-month free trial available. It’s not the first time Garmin’s charged extra for a service, such as Garmin Golf, its InReach satellite messaging service, or Outdoor Maps+, but they’ve always served a specific purpose.
What do you think of the Garmin Connect design? (Image credit: Garmin)
It’s hard to over-emphasize just how many people kicked off, perceiving it as being nickel-and-dimed for features people believed they should already get, having just spent hundreds of dollars or pounds on an expensive smartwatch.
You can read our backlash live blog for the full story, but it was a crazy couple of days. Garmin Reddit posts calling for boycotts hit thousands of upvotes, and I personally got hundreds of emails with lines like ‘If Connect+ goes ahead, I’m definitely done with Garmin’, ‘greedy company’, and ‘All new features from now on will be behind a paywall. And in few years, then the initial rage settles, they will move more and more features behind paywall like Strava did’.
True to form, now the furore has died down, we’ve just started to see new features get locked behind Connect+ paywall, in the form of nutrition tracking.
Vote in our Garmin Connect+ poll here
So, one year later, we’re doing a follow-up: are you using Garmin Connect+? If so, is it good? If not, did you switch away from Garmin?
Wherever you stand, we want to hear from you. Vote in our poll above, and I’ll publish the results next week, on the anniversary of Connect+’s launch. You can also contact me at matt.evans@futurenet.com, and I’ll publish some of your emails along with the poll results.
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