How to use the inDepth phone app

Setting up

1. Pair your watch in Garmin Connect first. inDepth has no pairing wizard of its own — it only lists the watches Garmin Connect already knows about.
2. Tap the watch status line at the top of the Sessions tab — a dot, your watch's name, and when it last synced. It expands to show your paired watches; pick the one to sync from. With a single paired watch it is chosen for you.
3. Open inDepth Blue (or inDepth Pool) on the watch, then tap Sync.

Keep the watch app and the phone app on matching versions. The sync protocol is a clean break across releases. Only one direction stops a sync: if the watch app is newer than the phone app, the card says "Update inDepth on your phone" and refuses the round rather than filing data it could misread. Your sessions stay on the watch and come across once the phone app is updated. An older watch app still syncs normally.

The three tabs

• Sessions — one newest-first list of everything: depth sessions with an aqua stripe, pool sessions with a blue one, grouped by month. Each card shows one number, one line, and one mark: hanging strokes for a depth session's dives, horizontal bars for a pool session's reps. Every depth card is drawn to the same scale — your deepest dive ever, which fills the card top to bottom — so a shallow session looks shallow. On a depth card the strokes run left to right in the order you dived them, evenly spaced, so how long the mark is tells you how many dives the session held — and the same session looks the same on your phone and in a browser. Tap the magnifier in the app bar to search by name or tag, and filter with the chips (All / Depth / Pool, your own tags, the pool disciplines you have swum). Tap a session for its detail; tap a dive or a rep for its own page.
• Workouts — build pool workouts and push them to the watch. Set the discipline, pool length and an ordered list of sets, with +/− steppers for distance and rest, so there are no numbers to type. Two starter workouts are there on first launch.
• Trends — a shelf of personal bests, one per discipline (CWT, FIM, DYN, DNF, STA — each measured by its own record: a depth, a distance, or a hold time), then a grid of equal-sized trend cards for deepest dive, bottom time, dives per session, water temp and pool distance. Depth records follow the discipline you tag a dive with; until you tag any, the shelf shows your whole-logbook deepest, longest and most dives instead. Each trend card needs two sessions to compare.

Syncing

Tap Sync in the pill. The phone asks the watch what is new and pulls it in small batches, re-requesting anything Bluetooth drops, so a large backlog gets through even on a busy link. You will see a real percentage, then one of four results:

Three things worth knowing:

• A Garmin watch runs one Connect IQ app at a time. One tap reaches whichever app is actually open — open inDepth Blue to pull dives, inDepth Pool to pull pool sessions and to receive workouts. One tap never gets both.
• You can stop a running sync at any time. Nothing partly transferred is saved, so nothing is lost — it is simply re-sent next time.
• Sync before the watch runs out of room. Each watch app holds the last 10 sessions — 5, and about 25 dives, on a Fenix 5 or 5S — and overwrites the oldest whether or not it has synced.

What you get on the phone

• Session detail — three numbers (deepest, dives, bottom time), then the session itself: a tape with every dive hanging below a 0 m waterline at the time it happened, so the gap between two dives is the surface interval, drawn to scale. A gap where you went back down short of the guideline the watch actually used is tinted red, in place. Above it, when the numbers support one, a single sentence of reading — an observation, never advice, and nothing at all when they don't. Below it, every dive as a thumbnail of its own profile, four across on one shared depth scale: tap to open a dive, press and hold for its flags, note and delete. Everything else the session recorded — start and end times, length, longest dive, surface interval, water temperature, watch, and the Surface rest tile naming the guideline (the same feature as the watch's Surface Rest Alerts) — is one tap away under Conditions.
• Dive detail — the discipline and flags you tagged the dive with sit under the title, then the dive as three thin lanes on one time axis: depth, heart rate and velocity, stacked and aligned. Drag across them and one line moves with your finger while the row above reads out the elapsed time, depth, bpm and velocity at that instant. The velocity lane is signed around a centre rule, so the turn is where the line crosses. Your note sits directly under the lanes — and on a dive you have not annotated, a quiet Add a note… row sits there instead, so you never have to know the pencil is there. Below that, max depth, duration, hang time, descent/ascent rates, average depth and a full heart-rate group: surface HR, bottom HR, the HR drop at depth (the dive reflex) and recovery. Every derived metric carries a small ⓘ with a plain-language definition.
• Pool session detail — one bar per rep with its distance, swim time, rest and heart-rate sparkline; each rep gets its own page built around its heart-rate trace. A session swum from a workout also shows a target tick and a Met / Under verdict per rep.
• Maps — sessions recorded with GPS on grow a WHERE card with satellite imagery, pins and a directions button that hands a spot to your phone's own maps app. The map icon on the Sessions tab opens Marked spots: every spot from every session you have synced, on one map. (One gap: a session where you marked a spot but never dived stays on the watch and is not synced, so its marks are not here. Your watch's own saved location for it still is.) The app never asks for your phone's location — every coordinate came from the watch.
• Rename, tag and annotate anything — sessions, individual dives, individual reps. It is all kept on the phone, and a re-sync never overwrites it.

Settings worth knowing

• Account — sign in with Google (both platforms) or Apple (iOS) to turn on cloud backup for dives, pool sessions, workouts, positions and marked spots, and to merge in anything already on the account from another phone. Two phones left open converge within a couple of seconds. Signing in is entirely optional: signed out, nothing leaves the phone — see the privacy policy.
• Your logbook in a browser — open app.in-depth.app with the same account, no separate sign-up. You can read and edit there too. It shows only what has already reached the cloud, and it does not refresh itself — reload the page to pick up changes.
• Units — depth, temperature and time each default to Follow watch, or override them on the phone.
• Pool defaults — the pool length and rest time that pre-fill new sessions and workouts, kept in sync with the watch (the most recent change wins).
• Session Notes — a short note (200 characters) for the watch to show during a session, synced to the cloud like a workout. Not sent to a Fenix 5 / 5S: they cannot display one.
• Import Garmin FIT — import .fit files from Garmin Connect, Garmin's own Pool Apnea activity, or the Apnea CWT app. A session already on the phone is skipped, not overwritten.
• Export all dives (CSV) — a spreadsheet-friendly, one-way export. It deliberately leaves coordinates out, because CSVs get forwarded.
• Back up all data / Restore from backup — a single lossless .json file covering everything, positions and marked spots included. Treat it as private for exactly that reason.
• Pull diagnostics from watch — bundles phone and watch logs into a .zip to attach when you report a problem.

If something looks wrong

"Couldn't reach the watch"

The watch app has to be open on the watch.

"Update inDepth on your phone"

The watch app is newer than the phone app, so the sync was refused rather than risk filing data the phone could misread. There is no Try again — updating the phone app is what fixes it. Nothing was lost: every session is still on the watch and comes across once you are up to date.

My pool sessions did not come across, but my dives did

Only one Connect IQ app can be open at a time. Open the other one on the watch and sync again.

My phone-built workout is not in the browser

Phone-built workouts reach the cloud when you sign in or tap Back up now — not the moment you save them. A workout built in the browser uploads immediately.

Nothing new shows in the browser

The browser does not update by itself. Reload the page.

A deleted session came back — or will not come back

The watch never re-sends a session it has already had acknowledged, so a delete after syncing sticks, and there is no undo outside restoring a backup. A delete before the watch's acknowledgement reappears on the next sync.

I deleted my account, kept my dives on the phone, and now nothing backs up

That is deliberate. Deleting the account erases the cloud copy; if you left "Also erase everything on this phone" unchecked, your local logbook stays — and it is not re-uploaded on a later sign-in, to any account, because that would put back exactly what you asked to have erased. Tap Back up now to publish it on purpose; ordinary syncing resumes after that.

A "watch app update available" banner

Your watch is running an older build; update it with the inDepth installer (install help). No banner does not prove you are up to date — it means the app has nothing certain to say.

The sync went quiet when I switched apps

On iOS it keeps running in the background, though it is not guaranteed to finish; on Android it may pause. Either way, coming back to inDepth continues that same sync where it left off.