The Garmin Instinct is one of the best smartwatches out there. It has a GPS and GLONASS receiver, a battery life of up to 14 days in smartwatch mode, and it’s durable enough to withstand extreme temperatures and harsh environments.
But what if you want to do more with that smartwatch? Your Garmin Instinct can track your steps, monitor your sleep, and even display notifications from your phone. But did you know that your watch can also be used as a payment method at certain stores? Or keep track of your health information to send to your doctor?
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Garmin Instinct
- Barcode – Save Wallet Space
barcode garmin app
Garmin Pay is useful for contactless payments. You don’t need to carry your cards because it serves as a virtual wallet on the go. However, sometimes if you wish to use your loyalty membership, gift cards, etc. then you need to carry it all in your pocket. With the Barcode app, you can store any kind of barcode you have. Once stored, you can redeem it anytime. This comes in handy because you don’t need to carry those extra cards with you.
Open in Garmin Connect
- MyHomeControl – Home Automation App
home automation Garmin app
Have you ever wanted to control your home right from your watch? Yup, that’s possible with the help of the MyHomeControl Garmin app. This app allows you to add all domotic devices & control almost every device you want such as lamps, doors, curtains, and many other IoT devices. For each device, you can configure up to four actions including open, close, up, down, start, stop, on, and off. With that, it also controls your Sonos system, sends mail, sends notifications, and sends SMS using IFTTT.
Open in Garmin Connect
- Strava Routes – Route Tracking App
running Garmin app
Strava Garmin’s app lets you track your daily routes. You can even share your tracked routes with your friends and families as well as follow friends, share photos, and join challenges. They can send you their running routes and then you can run in their tracks. Strava helps runners and triathletes to be competitive any time they want.
Open in Garmin Connect
- Maps Nav – Hands Free Navigation App
map nav garmin app
Map Nav is a Google Map navigation integration that allows you to view turn-by-turn directions right from your Garmin smartwatch. The app is quite useful when you are on biking or walking around you don’t have to look constantly at your phone for finding the routes.
Suppose you are in a foreign country and don’t want to look lost by taking out your phone and using the map, then you can use Map Nav to view the directions without taking out your phone from the pocket. This app makes the watch vibrate when there is a change in direction. How cool is that?
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Open in Garmin Connect
- Watchlist – To Do List, Notes, Task app
watchlist garmin app
The Watchlist app is developed by Microsoft that allows you to organize your tasks properly. With the help of this app, you can put up groceries, to-do tasks, movies, household lists, and more. You can easily sync all these right from your phone and don’t have to go through the Connect IQ app. This makes it more convenient.
Best garmin apps for cycling
Strava
Strava
Strava’s ace in the hole is its social component. Many riders use a GPS computer for recording and uploading rides to Strava – and then use the app for checking out what their friends are up to. Strava
While you can use Strava like a cycle computer on your phone, most riders use a separate GPS computer to record and upload their rides and then use the app to see what their friends are up to.
All rides uploaded to Strava deliver automatic rankings of your times over popular stretches of road and trail – known as ‘segments’ in Strava-speak – along with a GPS map of where you rode.
The real-time feature, which tells you how fast you are tracking on a selected segment, such as the local hard climb, works on smartphones but also newer Garmin Edge and Wahoo computers, too.
Strava’s special sauce, which separates it from its competitors, is the slick social component. Much like Facebook, you can follow friends and see where and how hard they’re riding, leave comments and give kudos on their rides, as well as post photos of your own rides.
Strava pivoted heavily towards a subscriber model in May 2020, putting formerly free features such as segment leaderboards and route planning behind a paywall.
Price: Free (premium version also available – £6.99 monthly/£47.99 annually)
Download: Strava for iOS or Strava for Android
BikeRadar is on Strava: Join the BikeRadar Strava club
MapMyRide
MapMyRide
MapMyRide does exactly what it says. Map My Ride
MapMyRide is similar to CycleMeter, but benefits from the parent company’s online history with route-mapping software.
The app is well-equipped for tracking not only rides but nutrition, weight and more, and can also get you to your destination.
The premium version includes training plans, more advanced routing options and live tracking that can be shared with family and friends. The premium version also ditches the advertisements you’re stuck with on the free app.
Price: Free (premium version also available)
Download: MapMyRide for iOS or MapMyRide for Android
Best cycling apps for route planning and navigation
Cycling apps for route planning and navigation will help you discover more roads and places to ride.
The best cycling apps aimed at route planning will allow you to plan your own rides as well as discover routes from other riders.
Some apps will do the heavy lifting and plan a route for you if you enter a destination, which is ideal for on-the-go adventures or cycling around town.
Bikemap
Bikemap discover a route
Bikemap is a route-planning and navigation app. Bikemap
Bikemap is an iPhone and Android app that offers route planning, navigation, real-time updates and plenty more.
In our experience, it’s a good alternative to Strava or Komoot for route planning and offers more for free, though both Strava and Komoot also have their own unique features.
The app’s real-time updates allow you to alert other Bikemap users to problems encountered during a ride. It’s not something we’ve found much use for, but might be more appealing to cyclists riding regularly in an urban environment.
Other features include an archive of more than seven million user-generated routes, route collections and in-app ride stats.
Most of Bikemap’s features are free to use, but there’s also a Bikemap Premium service, which opens up additional mapping options, including cycling-friendly map layers and 3D views of your planned routes, as well as offline navigation.
Price: Free (Premium version also available – £9 monthly/ £35 annually/ £89 one-off payment for lifetime access)
Download: Bikemap for iOS or Bikemap for Android
Google Maps
Google Maps
While you wouldn’t want to use it for a long ride, Google Maps’ combination of Google Search and touchscreen, bike-specific navigation is generally pretty good. Google
Apple has done some amazing things in the world of tech, but it can’t beat Google at mapping.
Just like you use your phone on the fly to find places, read a few reviews and then go to the one you select, you can use Google Maps to do this too – and get there on bike paths and bike-friendly routes.
Like any app, it’s not foolproof, but in its category it’s among the best there is. The audio turn-by-turn instructions are nice when riding, too; for riders who choose to ride with headphones, you can have your phone in your pocket and easily get where you need to be.
Price: Free
Download: Google Maps for iOS or Google Maps for Android
Komoot
Komoot
The Komoot app offers lots of information about your route.
While Google Maps is arguably the gold standard for dealing with navigation in general, it can sometimes come up a bit short for bike directions.
Komoot uses the open-source OpenStreetMap database and allows you to plan road, mountain bike and gravel rides as well as commutes. The big difference over Google Maps is in the routing, where Komoot tries to choose the most efficient route, taking into account how bike-friendly a road or path is, as well as your fitness.
Using a start and end point, Komoot will tell you the difficulty, fitness required, what road surfaces you’ll come across and an elevation profile to boot.
Once you’ve started your route, it will give you speed, distance travelled, distance remaining and allows for easy on-the-fly route changes. You can also check out other route recommendations in your local area.
Komoot also features curated highlights, as suggested by local riders and Komoot ambassadors. These can be a great way to discover unknown gems in your local area.
A premium subscription unlocks additional features, such as a multi-day planner and live tracking.
Want to know more? We’ve got a complete guide to Komoot.
Price: First map region free, subsequent map regions £3.99 (Premium – £4.99 monthly/£59.99 annually)
Download: Komoot for iOS or Komoot for Android
Ride with GPS
Ride with GPS app
Ride with GPS allows you to plan and navigate rides directly from your smartphone. Ride with GPS
Ride with GPS can plan routes in great detail, navigate and record your ride.
It’s got a user-friendly interface that allows you to start recording with a single tap, and can even be used to navigate offline, which makes it extremely useful out in the sticks or on long rides, where preserving battery power is important.
The route data provided is particularly helpful, with detailed elevation profiles that you can zoom in and out of, and see exactly where on the route the biggest climbs will be.
Want to share your rides in real time? The app lets you do just that, and it will even read comments aloud as you pedal. Not a bad thing to have when you need that last motivational push.
The free version allows you to create routes and record your rides, as well as set yourself goals. There’s a Basic subscription that gives you access to mobile app features such as turn-by-turn navigation, live logging and offline mapping. You can also publish ride reports.
The Premium version gives you all of this, plus advanced route editing, custom cue sheets, stationary bike support and private segments.
Price: Free / Basic $6 per month / Premium $10 per month
Download: Ride with GPS for iOS or Ride with GPS for Android
OS Maps
Ordnance Survey map tiles
A whole pile of maps are condensed into this clever app. Ordnance Survey
To some, paper OS Maps are a joy to use and things of beauty. But anyone who’s grappled with a South Pembrokeshire OS Explorer as it flaps in an Atlantic onshore wind will appreciate this app’s practicality. It’s a cartological database of the whole UK on your mobile device.
You can plot and record rides on the app, but the plethora of more cycling-focused alternatives make it a better research tool for us two-wheeled explorers.
The map overlays are handy for cyclists. The Greenspace option highlights grassy areas for off-road routes, while the National Cycle Network one displays quiet lanes and family-friendly routes.
For free, you can access the standard maps, aerial and night maps online. A subscription includes premium features, such as all 25,000 (Explorer) and 50,000 (Landranger) maps on- and offline.
The Landranger is brilliant for planning long rides and multi-day epics. It shows towns and campsites for stop-offs. The more detailed Explorer is useful for poring over the terrain of gravel or mountain bike adventures, for example to differentiate byways and bridleways from footpaths where cycling isn’t permitted. You could research in the app then plot the route on Komoot, which is easier to sync to your GPS computer.
If you remember how to read them from school, the Explorer’s contour lines and slope direction arrows show hills to avoid or include. Cleverly, you can set the app to flip between each view as you zoom in and out.
Price: Free or £2.99 monthly/£23.99 annually for premium subscription
Download: OS Maps for iOS or OS Maps for Android
Best cycling apps for fitness
The best cycling apps for fitness will help you track your performance over time.
They work particularly well with other sensors such as heart rate monitors and power meters to provide a whole load of data that will give you a greater insight into your riding. Some, such as TrainingPeaks, offer training plans dedicated to different abilities and goals.
Wahoo Fitness
Wahoo Fitness
Wahoo Fitness isn’t pretty, but offers tons of data. Wahoo
Perhaps the biggest draw of the Wahoo Fitness app is that it plays nicely with others.
It pairs easily with Bluetooth sensors, such as heart-rate monitors, speed sensors and progressive power meters, including Stages (with a Wahoo Key plugin you can pair with ANT+ sensors, too).
In a world where many companies guard your data in their ecosystems, Wahoo Fitness uploads to all the good sites – Strava, MapMyFitness, TrainingPeaks, MyFitnessPal – and, if you like, can push your data in your choice of five file formats via email or Dropbox.
If you’re a data hound, you’ll love the number-heavy presentation of the app, with eight customisable pages of data on speed, power, heart rate and more. Plus, there’s a GPS map – though it burns through the battery pretty quickly.
The app can also be used indoors with Wahoo’s indoor smart trainers.
Price: Free
Download: Wahoo Fitness for iOS or Wahoo Fitness for Android
TrainingPeaks
TrainingPeaks
TrainingPeaks offers a deep dive into training plans and metrics for coaches and athletes alike. TrainingPeaks
If you’ve ever had a cycling coach, you’ve probably used TrainingPeaks. Heck, even if you haven’t had a coach you may have used TrainingPeaks.
For everyone from coaches and high-performance athletes, to data-hungry office-based crit enthusiasts, TrainingPeaks offers one of the most comprehensive tools for tracking fitness and fatigue.
However, it is not to be confused with a social network, navigation, or route-planning app, so look elsewhere if that’s what you’re after.
The app allows you to create and schedule workouts, or choose from a wide selection of training plans crafted by coaches such as Joe Friel and Frank Overton.
Price: Free (premium versions from $9.92 per month)
Download: TrainingPeaks for iOS or TrainingPeaks for Android
Cyclemeter
Cyclemeter
Cyclemeter is impressively easy to use considering its breadth of features. Cyclemeter
Cyclemeter turns your smartphone into a great cycling computer – if you’re down with putting your phone on your handlebars, that is.
It’s similar to Wahoo Fitness in its wealth of customisable options during the ride, but you also get a smorgasbord of post-ride analysis. Plus, you don’t have to log into any site; the data stays on your device.
You can start/stop rides with your iPhone earphone remote button, too (if you choose to ride with headphones), and integrated Google Maps can assist you in unfamiliar areas.
Cyclemeter also plays nicely with Strava, Facebook, Twitter and more, while importing and exporting routes is also easy.
Price Free (in-app upgrades available for $9.99 each)
Download Cyclemeter for iOS or Cyclemeter for Android
Elite HRV
Elite HRV app
The app can indicate when you’re fine to ramp up training or dial it down. Simon Von Bromley / Immediate Media
For those who don’t already have enough data and metrics in their life, the Elite HRV app provides an easy way to track your heart rate variability (HRV).
Over time, HRV data can be used as a marker for monitoring your recovery from training and your readiness (or otherwise) to take on more training load.
You’ll need a compatible Bluetooth heart rate monitor, such as a Polar H10 heart rate strap (a full list of compatible devices can be found on Elite HRV’s website), but you’ll be able to track your HRV for free, with unlimited data storage.
You can also tag each reading with relevant information such as your mood, stress levels and recent activity, to help give further context to your results.
As you build up a longitudinal profile, the app will then be able to give you insights into your potential readiness for physical activity after each reading.
There are also paid tiers, which offer more advanced insights and readiness information, but for those interested in dipping their toes into using HRV as a training aid, the free tier offers a great deal in an easy-to-digest format.
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