App Trimming - a Bridge Too Far

My recent effort to cut down noise that manifests as a continuous avalanche of notifications on a phone has been quite successful. The phone is mostly silent, the watch does not vibrate and the earbuds do not interrupt audiobooks to play announcements. I only get a handful of "beeps" per day and they only come from a couple of selected contacts and apps I really do care about.

Apps generally abuse the notifications mechanisms in a big way. Rendering the notifications' mechanism practically useless. So I went through all of them, disabling notifications and also making sure they use location services only when an app is active / in the foreground.

What was not immediately obvious to me, was that the functionality of an app to stay connected over Bluetooth to an accessory (such as a watch) depends on the "location" permission to be "always". It does not explicitly say "Bluetooth", but iOS ties Bluetooth access with "location".

My particular problem was the Garmin watch was not updating / uploading the activity data in the background. Only when I opened the companion Garmin Connect app. So often many days in a row were missing. Luckily the data was still available on the watch.

For the watch to "wake up" the app in the background to sync activities, iOS requires the app to have Always access to your location—not just "While Using the App." The Garmin uses a "Bluetooth LE" wake-up trigger. Apple ties these background wake-up privileges to the "Always" location permission. SO the fix has been to go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Connect and set it to Always.

This solves the issue. An in the process of checking the settings for the Garmin Connect app, I found a couple of newly added apps have already pushed their default settings of background refresh and always on location access, so disabled them on the way.