Notifications not showing up on watch anymore

bvado

Hi,

After a recent update (I guess the latest one from January 25, but I'm not 100% sure) the notifications aren't showing up on my Garmin Vivoactive watch anymore. Other notifications from other applications do show up. It was a helpful tool to be reminded, even while the phone was muted.

Garmin Connect has access to the notification area, allowed by the " Device & app notifications" permission.

This is the information I gathered during my investigation in order to give you more information about what could cause the problem:

In the Notification History doesn't show much difference. This is a screenshot of a Col Reminder notification and a GMail notification. The mail did show up, col reminder didn't
However, I have a Notification Log shortcut on my desktop. This does show a difference: note how the icon is shown for the gmail notification, while it isn't shown for the col-reminder notification
Suddenly, a notification that I scheduled a couple of months ago, was activated and it appeared on my watch! There was a difference though. In the past, I could see the reminder text, while now only "Col reminder" (the app title) appeared. This is the notification from the notification log:

If I can give you more information, I'd be happy to share it with you. I really miss this feature, so I hope you can find a solution 😁

chrisonline

@bvado Sorry that I didn't answer this, but I didn't get a notification about a new post :-(

COL Reminder's notification were always sticky/not clearable, but some users reported that they can now be cleared.
After investigation, I have seen that on Android 13 and up, Google has changed this, and I need to add "ongoing" to the notifications to get this working again.

Before Android 13 it was enough to send it only as "NO CLEAR":
Bit to be bitwise-ored into the flags field that should be set if the notification should not be canceled when the user clicks the Clear all button.

With Android 13 I need also the flag "ONGOING" to achieve this because the "NO CLEAR" does only prevent to clear it if you tap on "Clear all", but the user can swipe it manually away.
I don't know why Google has changed this.

And some smartwatches don't show "ongoing" notifications and this is why you don't get the notification on your watch.

But I am checking if I can add this change only for Android 13 and up.
So it would work again until you have a phone with Android 13.

jm_bldz

Hi, how about that issue, is it still that worse ?
I'm using Samsung S21, Android 14 and Garmin Fenix8 - is there a way to make that watch-notification working ?
Without watch-notification from col-reminder, its only 50% worth it was before.

regards

J.M.

chrisonline

jm_bldz Hi, Google has not changed this yet.
Ongoing notifications are not shown on some smartwatches.

If your watch has Android Wear OS you can install the COL Reminder app on your watch and it should work again.
For not Android wear OS smartwatches it depends if your companion app allows to send also ongoing notifications.