Garmin Connect, the companion app that links Garmin smartwatches to your phone, is reportedly preparing a major update packed with new social tools, stronger privacy controls, and more helpful training and nutrition features. If you use Garmin for running, cycling, gym workouts, or general wellness tracking, these changes could make it easier to share progress, stay motivated, and keep your personal data under tighter control.
One of the biggest shifts is an expanded social experience that looks more like popular social platforms. Instead of relying only on mutual friend requests that must be approved, Garmin Connect is expected to introduce a follow feature that lets you follow other accounts without requiring confirmation. Mutual follows will still be recognized as “friends,” but the new approach should make it simpler to discover athletes, creators, training partners, and local communities.
To make the social side more practical for real workouts, LiveTrack and GroupTrack are said to be integrated more directly into these features. That means it should become easier to share your real-time location with others during activities like a run, ride, or group training session, helping friends or family keep an eye on your route and progress as you go.
Another rumored addition is a new option called “Authorized Viewer.” This would allow you to grant another Garmin Connect user full read access to your collected activity and performance data. The idea is to support deeper comparisons with friends or to let a coach review your stats, trends, and training load without needing to be physically present.
With more sharing options comes the need for better privacy, and Garmin is reportedly working on upgraded privacy settings. These controls are expected to let you fine-tune exactly who can view specific parts of your data, offering more granular choices than a simple public/private switch. Children’s accounts, meanwhile, are expected to have very limited access to social features, which could help keep younger users safer while still allowing basic fitness tracking.
Garmin Connect is also rumored to be improving training plans in a way that makes them easier to navigate and stick with. Plans may be organized into clear ability tiers such as Beginner, Challenger, and Achiever, helping users pick a program that matches their current fitness level. You may also be able to adjust the difficulty of a plan and set goals the plan should account for, which could make training feel more personalized and achievable.
On top of that, Garmin is said to be refining the nutrition tracking workflow, potentially making it faster and more intuitive to log meals or manage nutrition habits alongside your training and recovery data.
For now, it’s not confirmed whether any of these upcoming features will require a Garmin Connect+ subscription. Either way, the update appears focused on making Garmin Connect more community-driven, more coach-friendly, and more customizable—while giving users more control over how, when, and with whom their health and fitness data is shared.
