Battery Tracking
· v1.1.1
About
Battery Tracker logs your watch's battery in the background and shows you exactly how it's draining — history, rate, time remaining, and where the power is going. It fills the gap left by Garmin's Power/Battery Manager, which isn't available on the Instinct series.
WHAT IT SHOWS
Glance: current charge, drain rate (%/h), and estimated time until empty — at a glance, no need to open the app.
Open the widget for four pages (scroll with UP/DOWN):
• 3-Day graph — recent battery history with the current %, drain rate, and a time-remaining estimate.
• 2-Week graph — the longer trend, so you can spot which days cost you the most.
• Since Charge — a graph from your last full charge plus elapsed time, total drain, and average rate this cycle.
• Drain by State — how your battery is being spent, broken down by what the watch was doing: Sleep, Idle, and Active, each with its own %/h rate and share of total drain, plus total time spent charging.
Resets on each full charge.
HOW THE BREAKDOWN WORKS
Connect IQ doesn't expose per-feature power data (no "GPS used X%"), so Battery Tracker attributes drain to what it can observe: whether you were asleep (your sleep schedule), in an activity (activity timer
or step activity), idle, or charging. It's an informed estimate, not a hardware power meter — but it makes the difference between a heavy GPS day and a quiet one obvious.
HOW IT WORKS
The widget samples your battery every 30 minutes in the background — even when it's closed — and keeps two weeks of history on the watch. Nothing is sent anywhere; all data stays on your device. Sampling is
lightweight and designed to cost almost no battery itself.
After install it needs an hour or two of samples before the rate and estimate settle; the graphs fill in over the following days. The time-remaining estimate is based on your actual measured drain since the
last charge, so it reflects how YOU use the watch rather than a generic factory number.
SUPPORTED DEVICES
Instinct 2, 2S, 2X · Instinct 3 Solar 45mm · Instinct 3 AMOLED 45mm / 50mm.
PERMISSIONS
Background (to sample battery on a timer) and User Profile (to read your sleep schedule for the Sleep/Idle split). No internet access, no location, no data leaves the watch.
What's new
## v1.1.1 - 2026-07-24
- Fixed a crash (shows as the Connect IQ "iq!" error) that could occur once
the 30-day history buffer added in v1.1.0 filled up: several pages
rescanned the entire stored history on every render instead of just the
visible window, which could cross the watchdog limit on some devices
once a full month of samples had accumulated.
## v1.1.0 - 2026-06-17
- Solar tracking (solar models): live sun intensity on the 3-day page, plus
a Sun est row on the drain page — estimated battery % gained since last
charge, derived from Garmin's published solar specs (Connect IQ exposes
no real energy data).
- New DAILY page: total battery drained on each of the last 7 days, split
across local midnight.
- History extended from 14 to 30 days; new 1-month graph page.
- Long-graph window is now a setting (Garmin Connect Mobile): 14 days
("2 WEEKS") or 30 days ("1 MONTH"), defaulting to 30. Storage still
retains 30 days regardless of the choice.
- Round AMOLED Instinct 3 layout: headers, the bottom stats line, page
dots, and DAILY/DRAIN row labels were laid out for the Instinct 2
semi-octagon and clipped against the circular bezel — content is now
inset to the circle on round screens (Instinct 2 layout unchanged).