Products · Broad category
Garmin products
Raised as a usability problem by 27 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2015–2026), in 22 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
People raised many different problems with Garmin products, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 26 complaints
- Spotify controls on the watch are hard to remember and use, so music gets played accidentally2026-09-10
- Charging plug must be positioned just right, often needs wiggling to charge2026-07-28
- Garmin's UI is quirky and still weird even after the H1 redesign2026-07-18
- Features buried in a maze of button presses; turning on DnD takes many steps2026-07-17
- Garmin watches' interface is clunky compared to Pebble's2026-01-06
- Garmin watch interface is awful; few buttons make music control hard without touchscreen2026-01-05
- Map updates require account setup and cloud syncing, and the map display is cluttered and slow2025-09-08
- Notifications auto-disappear and users can't find out what they were2025-08-05
- GPS takes ages to sync, often fails, and drops progress mid-activity2025-01-29
- The interface is hard to use, though the complaint gives no specific problem.2025-01-29
- Four main menus are confusing to navigate2025-01-28
- App forces entering weight and height before setup, a dark pattern2025-01-28
- Charging cable springs fail, requiring angle fiddling and taping to keep contact2025-01-27
- Long touch to pause workout is annoying when sweaty2025-01-22
- Stats now show less data behind a grid of widgets, requiring deeper clicks to reach common items2025-01-21
- Non-intuitive user experience across Garmin products2025-01-09
- App lags and is unusable when Garmin servers are down2025-01-08
- Awful to use even for simple tasks like loading maps2024-09-02
- On a Mac, the watch needs a special Android utility and doesn't show as a drive2023-04-23
- Route planning is torturous and sync fails silently, leaving routes missing from device2022-11-02
- Some features and functions are buried and hard to find2022-09-08
- Unpairing phone silently reset watch configuration, which was annoying2021-01-15
- Basic stats can't be seen without internet, forcing phone app use with no reception2020-12-01
- Activity sync is flaky and scraping breaks whenever the site changes2020-07-23
- Garmin Connect is very confusing to the commenter2019-07-12
- Going back to the activity list waits half a second to a second, showing an empty list2015-07-13