Apple Intents – Is Garmin Connect the First Sports App to Work with the New Siri?

A: No

Apple has partnered with eight popular iOS apps to showcase Apple Intents for the new Siri. The lineup includes Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, WhatsApp, Temu, Threads, and Uber. With its huge global user base, you might expect Garmin Connect to make the cut as the sports/fitness representative.

It didn’t.

Instead, Apple chose AllTrails, the hugely popular hiking and outdoor navigation app with more than 60 million registered users. It’s a more logical pick for Apple: AllTrails already has a simple, action-based structure (“find a trail near me,” “record a hike”) that’s ideal for testing Siri’s new natural language model. Plus, its audience overlaps neatly with Apple Watch Ultra owners and the growing market for outdoor adventure wearables.

Apple Intents can express your app’s capabilities to the system. They act as a bridge between your code and system experiences and services. Each app intent encapsulates a single action specific to your app. The system exposes your actions directly from the Shortcuts app and in system experiences like Siri. [Apple]

Take Out

Whilst Garmin Fenix has defined the outdoor segment, Apple definitely sees Garmin as a competitor to Watch Ultra for space on our wrists. It has chosen to initially partner with apps that are essentially service app. That excludes Garmin, a product-heavy company.

tfk, the5krunner

With 20 years of testing Garmin wearables and competing in triathlons at an international age group level, I provide expert insights into fitness tech, helping athletes and casual users make informed choices.

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