Garmin also offers a Wrapped-like year-in-review called Connect Rundown, but there’s a catch: the recap is locked behind the company’s Connect Plus subscription service.
The move puts Garmin against the recent trend of free annual summaries that encourage users to share their stats across social feeds.
- What the Rundown includes and how it is presented
- Pushback from device owners after the paywall move
- Why monetize a year-end recap for Garmin Connect
- How it stacks up against other platforms and apps
- Garmin’s shared training trends seen across its platform
- What users should know before trying the Rundown feature
What the Rundown includes and how it is presented
Connect Rundown packages a user’s year into a colorful, shareable story covering steps, sleep scores, workout counts, training volume, and Garmin’s Fitness Age metric. It’s presented like a highlights show, inside Garmin Connect, in a similar format to the sharing-friendly style seen with audio and video platforms. As TechRadar reports, developers are hoping that the Rundown will form part of a wider effort to celebrate achievement wherever it lies across all aspects of Garmin activity, whether that’s steps taken every day or structured training for an endurance event.
Pushback from device owners after the paywall move
The paywall is debuting after a tumultuous first year for Connect Plus. Many buyers who shelled out hundreds on high-end watches expected the marquee software perks to come along with it. The early feedback around the subscription centered around whether features such as Active Intelligence, Performance Dashboard, Live Activity, and certain training tools should be monetized through an ongoing fee on top of hardware. The one-month trial has also been lambasted as too short to evaluate data-driven features which benefit from multiple training cycles.
Putting an annual recap behind the subscription has raised that tension. For most athletes, an annual recap is less something we need than something to celebrate and enjoy — a quick rundown that allows us to visualize all our hard work and share the journey with friends. It might feel like a nudge to sign up for something that competitors generally regard as a free retention strategy.
Why monetize a year-end recap for Garmin Connect
Wearables designers are increasingly relying on software and services to help even out revenue from product cycles. Analysts at IDC (and also Counterpoint Research) observed that ongoing services can enhance margins and minimize the seasonality of swings in device sales. For Garmin, the Rundown provides another enticement to try Connect Plus, which includes advanced insights and dashboards as part of a single tier. The bet is simple: if the recap generates interest in deeper metrics, some users will convert and stay.
There’s also a data storytelling angle. Recaps are prime real estate to surface metrics that live beyond your basic step counts — say heart rate variability trends, training load balance, recovery patterns. By anchoring the Rundown feature to Connect Plus, Garmin can spin those premium metrics as an entire enhanced experience rather than piecemeal upgrades.
How it stacks up against other platforms and apps
Most platforms popularized by the end-of-year recap trend — including YouTube, Duolingo, and Spotify — provide those summaries for free. Examples in the fitness industry are more of a toss-up: some health apps will serve up annual recaps for free and save deeper coaching to paid tiers. Apple’s Fitness Trends and monthly awards are offered as part of the service without any additional subscription, for instance, and Fitbit in the past has sent out annual summaries to account holders. That decision now stands out in contrast as few of those other platforms have found ways to actually monetize the recap itself.
Garmin’s shared training trends seen across its platform
Alongside the Rundown, Garmin pointed to broader patterns in activity it saw on its platform. Strength training sessions increased 29 percent, high-intensity interval training was up 45 percent, and racket sports soared 67 percent. On average, women also had a slightly lower stress score than men, with Hong Kong leading the world in step counts with a 10,000 daily average. These snapshots provide an idea of the kind of year a lot of users will find reflected in their own Rundown cards.
What users should know before trying the Rundown feature
If you’re on free-tier Garmin Connect, you’ll only be able to access the Rundown if you start a trial of Connect Plus or sign up. The recap itself won’t alter your training plan, but it can spice up a year of numbers and might unlock richer comparisons — provided you’re already working with premium insights. For the privacy-minded athlete, Rundown is shareable though not public by default — check what each card shows before it lands in your social feeds.
At its core, this is an exercise in testing how much users care about presentation versus access. Garmin is betting that a slick annual highlight reel, along with deeper analytics, will help to convert more people to Connect Plus. Whether that strikes a chord remains to be seen and will in part depend on how the paid tier conveys its reason for being alongside hardware that already fetches a premium price.
