Garmin's next safety feature may not live on your wrist at all. It may live in the other driver's phone.
Code inside Garmin Connect 5.31 references a location sharing handoff to Waze, the Google-owned navigation app. According to Gadgets & Wearables, which first reported the strings, the app contains text for "Share Location with Waze," "Share your rides with Waze" and "Waze Location Sharing," along with a consent screen and onboarding material for the feature.
The wording points at cycling. One string reportedly tells riders that when location sharing is turned on during a cycling activity, their LiveTrack position can be shown to people using Waze. Another says drivers on Waze will be able to see where the rider is.
Garmin has not announced any of this. The company has said nothing about a Waze partnership, no support page exists, and the strings sit in the app with no visible toggle.
What the feature would actually do
LiveTrack is not new. It has been Garmin's live location tool for years: you start a session, Garmin sends a link to the people you choose, and they watch a dot move along your route.
A Waze handoff would flip that model from private to public.
- Today: you pick who sees you, and they need your link.
- With the reported feature: your position goes into the navigation app that drivers already have open, whether or not they know you.
- The consent step in the code suggests it would be opt-in, which matters because broadcasting a rider's position to nearby traffic is a very different proposition from texting a link to a spouse.
The appeal is obvious on the road. A driver running Waze already sees crashes, stopped cars, closures and police reports. A cyclist marker would be one more live object on that map, and the most fragile one.
Waze built its business on exactly this kind of two-way data exchange. Its Waze for Cities program already takes partner data in and pushes traffic data out to governments and road operators. A Garmin feed of live rider positions would be a natural fit for that plumbing, with the difference that the markers move in real time rather than sitting at a fixed hazard.
Why this could matter more than another watch feature
Garmin has spent the last two years building a safety stack that mostly works in one direction: tell someone where you are, and hope they check.
LiveTrack does the telling. inReach messaging does it without cell coverage. The newer Garmin Locate tool, which we covered when it arrived with the Fenix 9, handles the "find my watch" problem rather than the "find me" problem. Every one of those needs a person on the other end who cares and is paying attention.
Waze solves a different problem. The person who needs to know you are there is a stranger doing 45 mph, and they are not going to open a link.
That is the gap this feature would close. It is also the reason the privacy question is harder than usual. A rider's real-time position, pushed into a consumer navigation app, is a lot more exposure than a link shared with three contacts, and the consent flow in the code is Garmin's acknowledgment of that.
What we do not know
Garmin has not confirmed the feature exists, and a string in an app build is not a shipped product. Plenty of code never reaches users. With that said, here is what the reporting leaves open:
- Which devices. Nothing in the code reportedly names supported watches or Edge computers. LiveTrack runs across most of Garmin's recent lineup, from Forerunner watches to Fenix to the Edge cycling computers, so the ceiling is wide.
- Whether it costs money. Garmin now sells Connect+, its first paid tier, and LiveTrack is already part of that pitch, with personalized profile pages and embeddable maps. A Waze integration would be an easy premium hook, and nobody has ruled it out.
- Where it launches. No country list has appeared. Waze is far stronger in some markets than others, which usually shapes how these rollouts get staged.
- What the driver sees. A bike icon, a "cyclist ahead" banner, or a dot that slides along the road are all plausible, and they are very different products.
- How the data gets out. LiveTrack sends through the paired phone's connection on most watches. Only the LTE and satellite models, like the Fenix 8 Pro and the Fenix 9 Pro, can push a position without a phone nearby.
The bigger picture
Garmin has been quietly turning safety into a subscription story rather than a hardware spec. Crash detection, LiveTrack, incident detection and satellite messaging all sit in the same bucket: features that justify a monthly fee because they only matter on the day something goes wrong.
Handing rider positions to a navigation app that 150 million people open is a bigger version of that idea. It also puts Garmin's data inside Google's ecosystem, which is not a small thing for a company that has spent years keeping its health data in its own app.
For cyclists, the practical question is simpler. Would you rather be a dot on a driver's screen, or invisible? Most riders we talk to would take the dot.
Bottom line
This is a leak, not a launch. Treat the strings as a strong signal that Garmin is exploring Waze sharing and nothing more. But the direction is clear: Garmin's safety roadmap is moving away from "share your location with people who care" and toward "make sure the people who might hit you can see you."
If it ships, it will probably do more for rider safety than any sensor Garmin has added to a watch in years. If it stays in the code, it is still the most interesting thing found in a Garmin app build this fall.
Sources: Gadgets & Wearables (the original teardown of Garmin Connect 5.31), Frandroid's follow-up report, APKMirror's 5.31 release listing dated November 3 2026, Waze for Cities program pages, and Garmin's own LiveTrack and Connect+ documentation.
