How To Enable Spotify and Strava on Your Samsung Gear S3

So you have purchased your Samsung Gear S3 and you want to be able to exercise with your performance data visible on your phone, have the workout sync automatically to Strava and listen to your offline playlists in Spotify?  The reasonable response to this is to download the Strava and Spotify apps onto your Gear S3 and get exercising…well…that would be wrong.  Strava don’t even have an app for the Gear S3 and Spotify requires some odd settings tweaks from the default to get it working.  In this blog I’m going to show you exactly how to enable Spotify offline and Strava on your Samsung Gear S3.

How To Enable Spotify Offline on Gear S3

1. Download and install the Spotify app onto your Gear S3.  This is simple, just follow the prompts in the Gear app on your phone.
2. In the Gear S3 be sure to go to Settings>Connections>Wifi and set to “Always on”.  This is important.
3. In Spotify settings, ensure Playback is set to “Stream on wifi” instead of “Remote”.  One small quirk to this, you may have to login to Spotify using the extra streaming device logins (user credentials are random number and your chosen password..set in the Spotify account settings online).  I actually had to delete an existing device as I had too many already in use.
4. Go to Your Music>Your Playlists and you’ll see the option to “Download”.  Select whichever playlist(s) you wish to download onto the watch.

Note:  The Samsung Gear S3 only has a small amount of space available to store the playlists (around 1gb).  My recommendation it to only download a workout specific playlist rather than your possibly very large normal playlist.

How To Enable Strava on the Samsung Gear S3

Enabling Strava on your Samsung Gear S3 isn’t as straight forward as it should be, and if it weren’t for a developer named Stefan Thomas and his custom watch face named “Sporty Watch” it still wouldn’t be possible.

Sporty Watch does a number of things really well, such as show your live exercise data (Speed, Distance, Time, Pace, Heart Rate).  It also allows you to connect to some widely used bluetooth heart rate wearables.  Most importantly though, Sporty Watch automatically syncs your exercise data straight into Strava once you’re all finished up and have returned to a Wifi connection.

This was technically possible using the built in Samsung Health exercise tracking app, with the  connected services option.  However, a large number of users reported consistent differences in the exercise data between the two services after syncing, making it pretty much pointless.

Enabling Strava on your Samsung Gear S3 with the Sporty Watch face is as simple as the below:

1. Purchase and download the Sporty Watch face on the Gear app store (it’s about $5AUD…bargain!).  http://apps.samsung.com/gear/appDetail.as?appId=org.qooapps.sportywatch
2. Ensure your watch settings has GPS on by going to Settings>Connections>Location and turn Location services on.  I chose the “GPS only” option instead of “Wifi and GPS”. (you may need to restart your watch after this).
3. Once installed, simple double tap in the open space next to the main time display to see your options.
4. Navigate to the Strava options and double tap the “Login” option.  This will prompt you to login to Strava on your phone.  I found this a bit frustrating because it wouldn’t always let me login using the browser it opens.  I found that if I opened  the actual Strava app at this point, it would login on the watch.

Get Running With Spotify and Strava!

So there you have it…if you own a Samsung Gear S3 and want to enable Strava and Spotify offline mode, follow the above and you’ll be listening to your favourite playlist and exercising with Strava in no time!

For those of you wondering that this has to do with Web and App development…well…not a great deal other than to show how poorly wearable app’s and cloud services are currently managed.