COROS just closed one of its biggest feature gaps. The August 2026 update, released July 29, brings real-time Live Tracking to COROS watches, along with a major overhaul of sleep scoring and a redesigned heart rate widget.
Live tracking is the headliner. It's the feature COROS users have been asking for since the Garmin era made it standard, and Forbes called the update "a key Garmin feature" finally arriving on COROS.
Here's everything in the update.
Live Tracking: Share Your Run in Real Time
The new Live Tracking lets friends, family, and supporters follow your location and live stats as you move. The implementation goes beyond basic location sharing:
- Route upload: upload your planned route before heading out, so spectators see where you are and where you're going, with real-time performance metrics overlaid on the viewing page
- Flexible sharing: start your activity now, share it later. You can launch a live link instantly from the Extender preview on your Progress page whenever you choose
- Photo and voice pins: snap photos with the Extender camera, drop pins with pictures attached, or leave voice pins, and spectators see it all live on your map
You'll find it under the Live Tracking menu in the Profile page of the COROS App. This matters most for ultra runners and cyclists, where support crews and family tracking is a genuine safety feature, not a gimmick. COROS has been the favorite race-day watch for years, and not having live tracking was a real omission against Garmin.
Sleep Tracking Gets a Real Upgrade
Sleep is the other big focus, with four distinct improvements:
- Updated scoring system that evaluates overall sleep quality and now incorporates daytime naps into your daily score. Nap tracking has been a weak spot for most sports watches, so folding naps into the score is a meaningful fix
- Sleep hygiene tracking: you can now track your sleep schedule regularity alongside real-time physiological stress, helping pinpoint what's actually impacting your rest
- Long-term trends: monitor how sleep quality and individual recovery factors evolve over weeks and months, not just night to night
- Sleep log editing: crop, extend, or merge split sleep logs directly in the app if an extended awake period interrupts your night. Anyone who's woken up at 3am and gone back to sleep knows how annoying fragmented logs are
Heart Rate Widget Redesigned
The HR widget now breaks data into three clear categories: Daily, Sleep, and Exercise. You can track long-term trends across days, weeks, or months, or zoom into the Daily HR graph for exact fluctuations throughout the day.
One caveat: weekly, monthly, and yearly HR statistics are only available for data from January 1, 2026 onward. So if you've been on COROS for years, your historical stats won't backfill.
Which Watches Get It
The update is rolling out to iOS and Android app stores now, typically reaching all devices globally within a week. After installing the app update, install the available firmware update for your watch to get the features. COROS generally ships major feature updates to its current-generation lineup (VERTIX, APEX, PACE, and NOMAD families), though older hardware occasionally misses specific features.
Bottom Line
This is one of COROS's more substantial updates of the year. Live tracking removes the biggest checkbox item on COROS's missing-features list, the sleep scoring overhaul addresses real user complaints about naps and fragmented logs, and the HR redesign makes long-term data actually readable. If you've been on the fence about COROS because of the live tracking gap, this update closes it.
We covered the May and Spring COROS updates earlier this year, and we'll keep tracking the monthly drops. If COROS ships the August 19 watch announcement that's been rumored, it'll be interesting to see if Live Tracking becomes a headline feature of the new hardware too.