Garmin announced today that their flagship product range the fenix 5 Plus watches (all sizes) would now be supporting Spotify. It's downloadable as a separate app (just like Deezer and iHeartRadio) from Garmin Connect IQ Store. It’s available in Australia now.
How do I get started?
To get started all you need to do is download the Garmin Connect IQ App. You can download this app via your phone or computer and then sync up your watch to install it. Once the app is downloaded and synced to your watch, you will need to open the app on your watch.
*As a note here you will need to be a Spotify Premium user to use this app on your watch
You can find the app under the ‘Music’ menu of your watch, or if it’s not there, you will need to specify your music source as Spotify. When you first try to open the app on the watch, it will tell you to load up Garmin Connect so that it can authorise and log you on the watch into your Spotify account.
Once you’ve authorised the account, that’s it, you’re ready to run and listen to your sweet power ballad playlists or podcasts.
Which Garmin devices are supported by the Spotify App
At this point in time, only the fenix 5 Plus models are supported. The reasons behind this haven’t been made very clear by Garmin, but from closer inspection, it’s not due to limitations by the hardware. It does appear that the other Garmin watch series’ need to be individually certified or approved by Spotify before the app can be supported on those devices.
So, at this stage, it looks like the forerunner music and the vivoactive music watches will be potentially getting it sometime in the future. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Which devices won’t be supported by Garmin Connect Spotify App
This is an easy distinction to make, if the device does not have offline music storage capability, for example, the original vivoactive 3, forerunner 645 (non-music version) it will never be able to support the Garmin Connect Spotify app. The app is only designed with the intention to work solely off the watches internal storage.