Device support
Which Garmin watches do Cubio apps support?
The soaring apps are built for Garmin round button watches — the kind you can work by feel, in sunlight, in a cockpit, without a touchscreen. Round screens from 218 to 454 pixels.
Where the real list is
Every app's product page lists the models that app declares, read from the app itself rather than typed by hand. The installer shows the same list. If your watch is there, it is supported; if it is not, no setting will add it.
The lists are not identical, because the apps do not ask the same things of a watch. An instrument that holds a national waypoint file needs memory an older watch does not have, and the app that needs the least runs on the most. Check the page for the app you want — a number written here would be out of date within a month.
Four gates
An app can compile for far more devices than it should be sold for. Before a watch is listed it has to pass all four:
- Round screen. The instruments are composed around a round face and its bezel, not scaled into a rectangle.
- Physical buttons. More dependable than touch with gloves, in turbulence, or without looking.
- A palette with greys. Inactive scales and secondary marks are drawn in grey; without those levels they simply vanish.
- A barometer. Climb rate, pressure altitude and flight levels come from pressure. Without one those apps are not degraded, they are broken.
Apps that read no pressure themselves stay on the same watch set anyway, so there is one boundary to reason about rather than two.
Which families qualify
- Forerunner — 645, 745, 935, 945, 955, 965 and newer round models.
- fenix 5, 6, 7 and 8, with the Solar, Pro and S/X variants that meet the gates.
- epix, MARQ, D2, Descent, Enduro and selected Approach models.
- Selected full-colour Instinct AMOLED models.
Why Venu, vivoactive and Edge are missing
They are good devices that fail a gate. Venu and vivoactive are touch-first with few buttons, which makes menus and in-flight controls unpredictable when you cannot look. Edge units and other rectangles are the wrong shape for instruments built around a bezel.
Low-colour Instinct MIP models are out for the palette: the display is tough, but it has no grey levels for the inactive parts of a scale. Instinct AMOLED models have the colour and are in.
One app in the range is not a cockpit instrument at all — a weight-and-balance calculator used on the hill, reading no barometer, no GPS and no phone. None of the four gates apply to it, so it runs on touch devices too. Its product page says so.
Hardware tested, and simulator checked
Two watches are flown rather than simulated: the Forerunner 745 and the Forerunner 935, both 240-pixel. The 935 matters out of proportion to its age — it is the tightest memory target the range has shipped to, and the limit on how much data an app can hold was measured on it rather than guessed. Everything else is checked in the simulator across all eight round sizes.
Simulator coverage catches layout and memory. Flying catches what only a real watch shows: sensors, GPS behaviour, buttons, sunlight and a six-hour day.
Buying one
Buy a round button model with a barometer. Forerunner, fenix, epix, MARQ, D2, Descent or Enduro, and check it against the product page for the app you want before you order.
The lists are deliberately conservative. Better to say no to a watch than to sell an instrument that is awkward to read or work in the cockpit.