YaMusic Sync

Many Garmin watches can play music on their own: headphones connect straight to the watch, and the phone can stay at home. Music gets onto the watch through apps from the music services — Spotify and Deezer have one, Yandex Music does not.

Yandex Music listeners went running without music or did it the old way, copying mp3 files over from a computer. What was missing was an app that brings your playlists and liked tracks to the watch on its own — as simply as the official services do.

The watch downloads the playlists you pick over Wi-Fi — directly, not through the phone — and plays them offline at up to 320 kbps, with album art, a list of what is downloaded and shuffle.

Untick a playlist and its space on the watch frees up by itself, while a per-playlist track limit keeps the memory from filling up completely.

Typing a username and password with five watch buttons is impossible, so sign-in works the way it does on a smart TV. The watch shows a QR code and a short confirmation code. You scan the QR code with your phone and land on a page of this site where the code is already shown in large type, with a single button: "Copy code & open Yandex". All that is left is to paste the code into the field and confirm the sign-in.

The first reviews were about exactly that code: people mixed up l and 1, autocorrect capitalised the first letter, and it was not clear where to enter it. Sign-in was reworked three times — the QR code on the screen, a bar showing the time left, the page with the button — and the questions all but disappeared. The password stays with Yandex: the app only receives an access key to the music, and the code itself never ends up in any logs.

A watch has little memory and battery, and Yandex serves data in chunks too big for the watch to digest. So the server prepares the track lists for the watch, album art can be switched off, and the first big download is best started on the charger.

The app is unofficial and not affiliated with Yandex. There is no streaming — only tracks downloaded in advance. Outside Russia Yandex sometimes refuses access; for that there is a workaround with a manually entered token.

Monkey C on Connect IQ: 76 Garmin watch models, from Forerunner to fēnix 9. The server that handles sign-in and prepares track lists runs on Python and FastAPI. Once a day the app sends anonymous technical statistics, which show which watches need fixes; they can be turned off in settings.