Garmin's unwavering commitment to physical buttons and how you can customize what they do is what makes them the gold standard in this area for me.
Most people may be unaware that Garmin has a strong foothold in the stringently regulated avionics industry, in particular in flight instruments, displays, deck and others human-machine interface products. In turn, specific regulations informed by ergonomics research are unambiguous in prioritizing safety and unanimously contain minimum usability requirements.
As an example, an AC [1, Ch. 7] advises on (electronic display) control devices, and another AC [2] advises on design and evaluation of controls and displays. The software-defined counterparts have immensely harder requirements that must be satisfied, which, in my reading, is incompatible with pure touchscreen devices.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/...
[2] https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/...
Physical buttons, though... I've lost more than one bike ride because the start/stop button was bumped on the Forerunner and it turned out not to be recording.
If recorded elsewhere it can depend, but that’s due to Strava being irritating/changing/dropping integration features in the last couple of years and not an Apple ecosystem issue.
Or those people have maps uploaded but have chosen not to make them public?
No cloud account needed!
I connect the watch via USB cable and copy the FIT files over to the computer.
Looks like there's the same setting in a similar location on the Epix watch - https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/GUID-E5C62F3F-DCE3-4...
I've had that happen to me during yoga and boxing workouts I've recorded. There's a way to lock the physical buttons (at least on my Instinct watch), which requires multiple presses to stop/start a workout. IIRC, it's by holding the light button.
Everything goes into Apple Health but individual apps can barely talk to one another. Oura won’t pull heart rate data from Apple Health, so when I track my lifting workouts on my watch (a ring is a no-go for barbell work) it’s not there. Same for my Polar chest strap which I use during judo and BJJ. Oura is completely blind to this despite the data being available and it having access through Health.
Strava only pulls in workouts for apps that have been directly connected to it. So I have to have n:m connections between apps with this model, and only get sync between apps that have explicit Strava integration. For Garmin cycling workouts this works okay. When I integrate with Polar workouts, Strava insists on reduplicating the data back into Apple Health a second time. I have yet to find a way to get the data into Strava but have it recorded once instead sold zero times or twice.
Garmin directly refuses to use anything not recorded from their own devices. It won’t import sleep from my Oura or Withings trackers, heart rate from anything else, etc. Want to use any of the derived metrics in their app? Sorry, you'll need to exclusively use Garmin devices for everything in order to have all that data in place.
The only thing that isn’t a complete shitshow in this entire ecosystem is Apple Health.
I don’t think I really care all that much though. Other than older heart rate data from my watch and workouts recorded on my watch, all the data is already stored in the apps that created it: Strava, Oura, Garmin, Polar, etc. If I went elsewhere, those apps will still have all their own collected information.
I don’t mind that those apps are the source of truth for stuff collected from their own devices. I just want them all to share data with and communicate to one another through Apple Health instead of insisting they can only use data they directly collected (Garmin, Oura, Polar) or requiring direct integration between every pairwise set of apps (Polar, Strava).
Oura's first Ring was released the same year as the Watch, so I don't think that Oura was given early access.
Apple Health has been around over ten years. Oura could have figured out in the intervening time how to read heart rate data from Health.
All I’m asking for Strava, Garmin, and the rest is to just use Apple Health to import data from other sources and assume that it is the source of truth for externally-generated data rather than requiring direct app-to-app integration or simply ignoring anything their devices didn’t emit.
It took a bit of work to get those converted to a modern format (load into ancient tool, which is still maintained, and write out as GPX files... one at a time). But then these GPX files can be uploaded to Strava and there they are! Activities older than Strava itself, fully integrated.
Also I've more than once had a "whoopsie" - app left recording during the drive home, for example. Download activity from Strava, edit the GPX file, delete the activity and re-upload from the file.
And when you download your stuff from Strava, you get a database dump. That's both good and bad; e.g. users are just numbers and you'd need to use the web Strava to translate them to names, but all your photos and all your traces and all your stats come down in standard formats (jpeg, gpx and csv respectively) and nothing is dumbed down; everything is in the best possible format for re-import to something else.
Granted, I'm not a serious runner, I only do it as a supplement for my muay thai training (i.e. I'm only running 5-8k at like a 4'30" or so pace). So I guess I'm interested in what runners who are running as their primary sport like about the Garmin, as I often hear people say the Garmin is so much better.
Play music and run is fine for lots of people, though, so I'm not surprised it works for you.
That's one aspect that's relevant once you're done, the other one relevant during the workout is that you can set different targets for different parts of your workout, e.g. you want to be at 100 bpm during your warmup, 160 bpm during a 4min interval, then rest 2min at 120bpm, things like that. If you don't strictly follow the program you initially planned (e.g. you want to have as much rest as you feel you need) then you'd have to interact with your watch.
Definitely easier to navigate a playlist with physical buttons -- I run with airpods and just do the double/triple touch on them for forward/back.