In the Garmin Connect iOS app, you can choose to display notifications for any combination of Calls, Texts (i.e. Messages app), or Apps (i.e. every other app). With Pebble and Fossil, are you for example saying you can choose to display Instagram notifications but hide Snapchat? Garmin seems to indicate that their limitation of iOS, as the Android Garmin Connect app allows the user to choose individual apps to display on the watch.
Yes, that is absolutely possible. I did that on my Pebble 5 years ago, on a Fossil 3 years ago, and on various other devices (Amazfit GTR4?) when I was testing out devices a year ago.
IIRC, when the Fossil hybrid smartwatches first launched, this capability was not enabled, and they got a lot of feedback on it. By the time I tried one a few months later, the capability was live.
It looks like on Garmin you can only roughly affect which apps send notifications through via the "notification center" designation. If you otherwise don't care about the notification center (I don't), then it's a decent way to filter. But if you otherwise would care about what's in your notification center, then it's not great.
I wonder if Garmin thought they were helping people by mirroring the notification center preferences? If so, they should have let people choose between "use my notification center preferences" and "I'll choose my own apps".
I don’t have a Fossil smartwatch, but the way they’re describing the notification filtering is you have to get a notification first to be able to filter that app’s notifications. That’s markedly different than how it’s done for Apple Watch, which allows mirroring the iPhone’s notification settings or changing them on just the watch.
It’s pretty obvious what Apple’s argument would be for why third party smartwatches can’t access the notification settings of all apps - security. It’s totally feasible for them have iOS manage those notification settings and send the desired notifications to the smartwatch. They just don’t because… why would they? It makes the Apple Watch enticing. I love my Forerunner enough that this only slightly annoys me.
Both the notification center workaround Garmin created and the “wait for a notification from the app before you can start filtering them” workaround suck. Apple should be providing the APIs to implement the same notification options on a third party smartwatch.
The Garmin solution is not great. I didn't mind the Pebble/Fossil solution. Basically, if an app sends notifications a lot, you can pretty quickly set the setting for it. And if an app rarely sends notifications (like the United app, if you travel rarely) then it will show up by default the first time and you can change the preference if you want. I didn't really mind this process, and in some ways it's better than having to scroll through every app that could conceivably send a notification. I wore my Pebble for almost 5 years — until the battery was down to 1 day — and this was never something that I minded or even thought about. I would slap my Pebble back on if the battery were fixed, for sure!
If you clear a notification on your watch does it clear it from the phone? It's a tiny thing, but it's really nice to have.
Similarly, if the notification has a "Reply" option (say a Slack message), can you reply on your watch? Very useful when I get a work message when I'm walking the dog.
I don’t think clearing a notification on the watch affects the phone, but that’s not actually bad for me. Since I can’t reply from a Pebble anyway, having the notifications still on my Lock Screen is helpful so I can immediately reply from the phone.
As I mentioned in another comment, the inability to reply from third party watches is a bummer.
