I always had trouble connecting my garmin 830 to my phone. It's fairly simple to do, but tedious. Then I noticed that my rides were being automatically uploaded. I thought they had fixed the problems with connecting to my phone, but it turns out it's doing it via wifi. I have to say that the functionality added by the phone connection are pretty nice. I remember scrambling to find a computer when I was on a trip and needed to upload a route. Those days are over, just use my phone.

tl;dr: I don't use my phone to talk to the garmin unless I'm travelling. On a day to day basis, there is no need.

Next time I need to load something on my 830, I'm going to try wifi and garmin connect.