COROS

Coros has so many more fitness features than Apple Watch has for tracking workouts. You can customize your workout to do intervals, you can use it to track strength/resistance training with a ton of common exercises, you can set inclines and speed when you run indoors, the list goes on. My main complaints are not a huge deal, but one is that the indoor walk workout does not allow you to set speed or incline, and second that you can’t set the watch display timeout, which if you have a lot of data on your watch face, can dim too soon. Really those are minor compared to the benefits, but as someone who does walks for cool downs and incline walks for recovery/muscle building, it is a little frustrating there is no way to track them accurately when those options both exist on the indoor run workout.

I switched from Garmin to Coros and love the Apex 2 Pro watch itself. However, from day one I have had issues getting my watch to connect regularly with the app. I have communicated with Coros support, but they had no solutions and wanted to blame either my phone or my settings. The watch connection simply isn’t consistent and stable. I have to manually reconnect dozens of times every day, simply because I walked away from my phone. The watch should reconnect automatically, but it doesn’t. I have to manually refresh the Coros app 2–3 times after a workout in order for all of the data to transfer. Not all data transfers in a single refresh, which makes no sense. And regularly, activities don’t sync to Strava without multiple refreshes of the app. This simply wasn’t an issue with Garmin. I really want to love the app, and I appreciate all the data it provides for my workouts. But the simple connectivity ruins the whole experience.

I like my Coros Apex watch, but this app is terrible. My main problem with the app is that it is impossible to visually track any longer term trends in regard to items such as resting heart rate, fitness level, VO2 max, sleep, and training load. It’s super helpful for any athlete to track this kind of data over 12 month, 6 month, 3 month, etc. timelines, but there is no way to do this within the Coros app. For example, I feel like I might be getting sick today, so I want to see if my resting heart rate is elevated in comparison to my normal levels. The only way to do this within the Coros app is to go back through every day over the last few weeks and write down the resting heart rate for that day by hand in order to plot my own graph. Coming from a Garmin, I could see a graph of my resting heart rate over the last 7 days from the watch without even using their app! Coros needs to get the software side of their business figured out before trying to push any more hardware out to the market. I’ve had my watch for about 2 months now, but I’m strongly considering returning it because the app is so bad.