Dotpace is a minimal dot-matrix watch face for Garmin Connect IQ devices, built by the same team behind Runima. It pairs a calm, readable clock with an on-device Trends page: history charts for your watch's own key health metrics, drawn the way we'd chart them on a dashboard — right on your wrist, no phone required.
The dot-matrix look
Dotpace centres the time in Doto, a rounded dot-matrix typeface, with your chosen stats arranged in calm, even rows of dots around it. No gradients, no clutter — just clean type that reads at a glance, in direct sunlight or at 2am. Seconds are optional and only show while the screen is awake. The date follows your watch's language, so French, German, Spanish and other Latin-alphabet languages see their own day and month names.
It ships two layouts in one app. Rows puts two stats above the time and two below, with the date shifting to frame whichever side is emptier — leave a slot empty and a lone stat recentres against the screen edge. Cross pins one stat to each of the four screen edges with time dead-centre.
Thirty-six metrics, four slots
Four metric slots fill clockwise, or leave any of them blank. The choices are grouped into six categories on the watch, so picking one is a couple of taps rather than a long scroll:
- Activity — Steps, Distance, Calories, Active Calories, Floors Climbed, Floors Descended, Intensity Minutes, Move Bar
- Body — Heart Rate, Stress, Body Battery, Breathing Rate, Recovery Time, Pulse Ox, VO₂max, Skin Temperature
- Device — Notifications, Phone Connection, Watch Battery
- Weather — current conditions, Feels Like, Today's High and Low, Humidity, UV Index, Wind Speed, Elevation, Barometric Pressure, Sunrise/Sunset
- Weekly Totals — Distance, Steps, Floors Climbed, Calories, Active Minutes
- Wheelchair — Pushes, Push Distance
Metric or imperial units and 12- or 24-hour time follow your watch's own settings. If your watch can't supply a metric, Dotpace shows a calm "--" instead of a wrong number.
Track your trends, right on your wrist
Three overview pages come first — 90, 30 and 14 days — each lining up how every metric has moved over that window. Changes are colored by direction: green when a metric moves the healthy way, red when it doesn't. Lower is better for Stress and Resting Heart Rate, higher for the rest.
Then each metric gets its own 90-day dot-and-line chart, with separate 90-day and 30-day trend badges, so you can tell a long-term shift from a recent dip. A single VO₂max reading tells you almost nothing on its own — the same number can be climbing or falling depending on where it started. The chart is what turns it into something you can act on. On a fresh install, Trends shows "Collecting data..." until it has at least two days to compare.
All Trends history is computed and stored on the watch itself — nothing is uploaded anywhere to draw these charts.
Make it yours
Colour the hour and minute digits independently, and pick separate colours for your metric values and their labels. The palette runs thirty-two tones deep — sixteen bright shades for a punchy, high-contrast look, sixteen deeper shades for something quieter, plus white, black and grey. Pair that with Dark or Light theme, and Dotpace scales pixel-perfectly across 100+ round Garmin watches, from 218px dials up to 454px AMOLED flagships.
How Dotpace has grown
- First release — the Doto clock, Rows and Cross layouts, four metric slots with seventeen everyday stats, and Dark and Light themes.
- July 2026 — Trends arrived: a 90-day chart for VO₂max, Stress, Body Battery and Resting Heart Rate, plus one overview page. The palette grew to thirty-two tones.
- Later updates — the metric list more than doubled, to thirty-six, sorted into six categories so the longer list stays quick to browse. Dates started following the watch's language, and lower-memory watches got faster, steadier settings.
- Latest release — Trends got deeper: Body Battery split into daily low and high, overviews for 90, 30 and 14 days, separate 90- and 30-day badges on every chart, and green/red coloring for the direction of each change.
Shaped by feedback
Dotpace's roadmap runs on user requests, not a fixed plan. The Trends page exists because people asked for a way to see VO₂max and Stress history without opening an app; the metric list, the two layouts, the palette depth all trace back to the same kind of ask. Whatever Connect IQ's SDK allows for a requested feature, we build it — this release includes everything the platform currently permits for the requests we'd had.
Your data stays on your watch
Dotpace only reads what it needs to draw the face and its Trends charts: the time and date, the stats you choose to show, current weather, your watch's last known location for sunrise and sunset, and your profile only when Active Calories or VO₂max is shown. No accounts, no analytics, no network requests — nothing is collected, stored off-device, or sent anywhere, including to Runima. There's no account to link and no sync between the two.
Get it
Dotpace is available now, free, on the Connect IQ Store — search "Dotpace" from the Connect IQ app on your phone or at apps.garmin.com.
Garmin®, Connect IQ™, and the Garmin logo are trademarks of Garmin Ltd. or its subsidiaries, registered in the USA and other countries, and are used here only to describe compatibility. Dotpace is a third-party application built with the Connect IQ SDK; Runima and Dotpace are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Garmin.
Read our sources and editorial policy. This guide is not personal medical or training advice.
