Health Technology
Quick Verdict
Yes. Garmin Connect syncs to Health Connect on Android, and it has done since Garmin Connect 5.14.1 arrived in early July 2025. If you want your Garmin steps, heart rate, sleep, calories, distance and weight to appear in another Android health app, that route works today and it is the route most people should use. On iPhone the equivalent path is Apple Health, which Garmin has pushed data into for longer. Neither one needs a developer, a workaround app, or a paid bridge.
Now the catch, and it has two halves. The first is that Garmin sends the raw ingredients and keeps the cooking. The data list Garmin published for Health Connect is ordinary stuff: steps, distance, heart rate, sleep, calories, weight, body fat. Android Central reported that Garmin withholds "key proprietary data like Body Battery, training load, aerobic/anaerobic training effect, intensity minutes, running tolerance, endurance score, or HRV status," along with VO2 Max and running power. So the numbers you probably check first in Garmin Connect are the exact numbers that do not leave it. The second half is direction: this is a one way push. Notebookcheck put it plainly, that "Garmin can only send data to Health Connect in a one-way transfer. In other words, the Garmin Connect app cannot read data from Health Connect." Nothing you record on a Pixel Watch or in another app comes back the other way.
What Garmin Sends to Health Connect
Garmin's list splits into activity data, written after a workout, and wellness data, written through the day. Notebookcheck and Android Central published the same list within about a week of each other in mid 2025, and the two match.
Activity data: active and total calories burned, cycling pedal cadence, distance, elevation gained, heart rate, speed, steps, and swimming strokes.
Wellness data: body fat, calories burned, floors climbed, heart rate, sleep, steps and step distance, and weight.
Notebookcheck reported two conditions worth knowing before you go looking for the setting. Sync requires your explicit consent, which means a permission screen you have to complete rather than a switch that flips itself, and it needs Android 14 or later. The models it named include the Venu 3, Vivoactive 5, Fenix 7 and Fenix 8, so this is not limited to whatever Garmin launched most recently.
One practical note from Garmin's own forum. When the feature was announced for June 2025, owners spent weeks unable to find it. One wrote that they "still cannot see any options to setup, either in Garmin's app or directly in Health Connect," and another that "Communication about this from Garmin has been poor." A Google representative said on June 12 that the feature was tied to a Garmin app update expected that month, and by July 7 a user on the same thread confirmed version 5.14.1 had switched it on, saying "I tried it and it works." If you cannot find the option today, update Garmin Connect first. That was the answer then and it is the most likely answer now.
The Three Routes Out of a Garmin, Side by Side
There are exactly three ways Garmin data reaches software Garmin did not write: the direct Health API, Health Connect on Android, and Apple Health on iPhone. They carry different things, which is the part no single page seems to lay out. The Health API column comes from Garmin's own developer documentation. The Health Connect column comes from the published sharing list. The Apple Health column comes from the5krunner's June 2025 rundown, and where that piece does not name a metric we have said so rather than guessed.
| Metric | Garmin Health API (direct) | Health Connect (Android) | Apple Health (iPhone) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steps | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Distance | Yes, in epoch summaries | Yes | Yes |
| Calories | Yes | Yes, active and total | Yes, active and resting |
| Heart rate | Yes | Yes | Yes all day, high and low only for activities |
| Sleep | Yes | Yes | Yes, as sleep analysis |
| Weight and body fat | Yes, as body composition | Yes | Yes, plus BMI |
| Blood pressure | Yes | Not on the published list | Yes |
| Pulse Ox | Yes | Not on the published list | Not named in the source we checked |
| Respiration | Yes | Not on the published list | Not named in the source we checked |
| Stress | Yes | No, withheld | Not named in the source we checked |
| Body Battery | Yes | No, withheld | Not named in the source we checked |
| Intensity minutes | Yes | No, withheld | Not named in the source we checked |
| HRV status, training load, VO2 Max, endurance score | Not listed on the Health API page | No, withheld | Not named in the source we checked |
| Beat to beat intervals | Yes, commercial license required | No | Not named in the source we checked |
| Workouts | Yes | Yes, activity data | Yes, without GPS tracks |
| Can a new app get access in 2026? | No, applications are paused | Yes | Yes |
Read the bottom row against the rest of the column above it. Garmin's direct API is the only route that carries Body Battery, stress, Pulse Ox, respiration and intensity minutes, and it is the one route a new app cannot get into right now. That is the whole situation in one line.
Why New Apps Cannot Connect Directly Anymore
Garmin's Connect Developer Program is the route a cloud service uses to read your Garmin data straight from Garmin. Its Health API page lists a deep set of metrics: steps, intensity minutes, sleep, calories, heart rate, stress, Pulse Ox, Body Battery, body composition, respiration, blood pressure, and beat to beat intervals under a commercial license. It is much richer than anything Health Connect carries.
That page no longer has an application form. Where one used to be, it now says "Stay tuned for more updates on the program," and points would be partners at a general contact form instead. the5krunner reported on September 14, 2026 that processing of new applications stopped around spring 2026, that Garmin has privately described a "significant redesign and modernisation of the API program and related processes," and that there is no timeline for reopening. Existing integrations keep running, and Connect IQ, the separate program for watch faces and on device apps, is unaffected.
Garmin's own developer forums show what that feels like from the outside. On one thread, started by a developer building an AI health coaching app who never got told why his request was rejected, one commenter listed ticket numbers for two rejected requests and five weeks of silence; another said they had spent twelve months building before discovering the program was gone; a third confirmed that the form had been removed and that "new API access requests are paused, with no projected re-opening date." At least six people described the same wall on that single thread. On another, a founder who applied in September 2025 and reapplied in April 2026 wrote that "Product roadmaps, architecture and investment decisions have to move forward" without knowing whether access is weeks away or indefinite. Garmin staff had not replied on either thread. Meanwhile the program's own FAQ still tells applicants to expect an answer within two business days.
the5krunner links the timing to Strava, which sued Garmin over API terms and attribution requirements in 2025 and then dropped the case a few weeks later without explaining the terms publicly. That connection is one outlet's reading of the sequence, not something Garmin has confirmed, so treat it as context rather than cause.
For you as an owner, none of this breaks anything you already use. It changes what can be built next. An app that had Garmin access before the freeze keeps it. An app that did not now has to reach your Garmin data through Health Connect or Apple Health, which is precisely why the withheld metrics in the table above matter more than they used to.
How to Turn It On
On Android, update Garmin Connect, then open its settings and look for the Health Connect entry. The permission screen is where you choose what gets shared, and because the sync is one way, the only permissions that do anything useful are the write ones. If the entry is missing, the app version is almost always the reason, as Garmin's forum thread showed through the whole of June 2025. Android 14 or later is required.
If you want the step by step version on the Vora side, our connect Garmin on Android guide covers the account setup, the sharing permissions and the history limits, and getting health data into Vora through Health Connect covers the permission steps and how to diagnose a record that never arrived. One ordering detail catches people out: your watch has to upload to Garmin Connect before Garmin Connect can pass anything on, so a sync that looks broken is often just a watch that has not talked to your phone yet.
Two things to sanity check afterward rather than assume. First, look at whether sleep arrived as a full night with stages or as a single block, because sleep is the metric most likely to land in a reduced form. Second, check a workout: Garmin sends activity data to both stores, but the5krunner noted GPS tracks do not make it into Apple Health, so a run can appear with its duration, distance and calories while the map stays in Garmin Connect. We have written more about that general pattern in which wearable metrics actually sync to Apple Health, because the gap between what a vendor says it syncs and what turns up is a recurring problem across every brand, not a Garmin quirk.
What This Means If You Are Choosing a Watch
If your reason for buying a Garmin is Garmin's own ecosystem, none of this should worry you. The watch is unchanged and Garmin Connect still shows everything.
If your reason is that you want one app to hold your whole health picture, be specific about which numbers you need. Steps, heart rate, sleep, weight and workouts travel fine. Body Battery, HRV status, training load and intensity minutes do not, and there is no consumer setting that changes that. People sometimes buy a Garmin expecting to read Body Battery inside a third party dashboard, and that expectation is the one that breaks. Our look at how accurate Garmin sleep tracking is covers the quality of the sleep data that does travel, and Garmin's Q3 2026 update covers what has been moving behind the Connect+ subscription.
The wider lesson is about who controls the export. A device whose data you can only fully use inside one company's app is a different purchase from a device whose data you own in practice. We looked at one of the sharper versions of that problem in putting glucose data on a Garmin watch, where the value depends entirely on whether two systems are allowed to talk.
Where Vora Fits
Vora reads Apple Health and Health Connect, and it also connects to Garmin Connect directly, free on every plan, on iPhone and Android. That direct connection, added in Vora 3.3.4, imports workouts, steps, heart rate, resting heart rate, HRV, sleep stages, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, VO2 max and body composition, then keeps syncing in the background after your watch syncs with Garmin Connect. You can use the Health Connect or Apple Health route instead, and Vora reads those records too. The full list is in Does Vora work with Garmin?
We should be equally clear about the limits. Garmin's own scores stay in Garmin Connect: Vora does not import Body Battery or Training Readiness, and it calculates its own Recovery score from your overnight HRV, resting heart rate and sleep instead. The Garmin connection carries no food data either. If Garmin's scores are the heart of how you train, Garmin Connect stays open alongside whatever else you use, and that is a reasonable setup rather than a failure.
What the shared metrics are good for is the question Garmin Connect does not really answer: what last night's sleep and this morning's heart rate mean together, in the context of the last three weeks rather than the last screen. Our integrations page lists exactly what we read today, and Vora on Android covers the Health Connect side in more detail if that is the phone you carry.
