It's a lucky day when someone from Garmin graces Forums with their presence and bestows few sentences they think could pass for an answer.
In other words, yeah, the SDK is free, you can side-load and it’s not hard to write for, but you just can't write much.
> Monkey C compiles into byte code that is interpreted by a virtual machine, similar to Java.
https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/reference-guides/mon..., 2nd paragraph.
> Don’t know about Apple Watch development
Garmin has refused to fix this for many many years, and there's no games you can play with SDK that will help you fix it yourself
I've written my own little app for my Garmin watch, and I didn't need to get permission from them or pay them anything.
Does anyone at Garmin actually practice sports? For a company with such great hardware they really need someone competent on the UX team. Throwing everything into more and more menus and submenus is not working.
The specific watch I'm criticizing is Garmin Instinct 2x solar. The name is very ironic because there is nothing intuitive about using that watch. Like, at all.
The software is pretty crap though, and forerunner in particular is way too locked down towards running activities.
Wet is always a disaster, though. If it's going to be moist outside (like hiking with a rain jacket), you have to remember to apply water lock immediately, or you're done for. In that case, the watch is pretty much useless until you get back inside, which is in fact very annoying.
Not sure what problems you've had with it specifically
All operations are buttons because the touch doesn't work well with water on basically every device.
Literally 3 clicks to a large lap counter.
this watch has no touch interface. any scrolling and selecting has to be done via the five buttons which I ALWAYS somehow get wrong. Who on this beautiful earth thought it was sane to make the bottom right button be the "Back" button in a L2R (English) locale?
These devices have to work in all conditions with some complex functionality available through only five buttons so some level of overlap is unavoidable. Do you also complain that your computer keyboard lacks separate buttons for "4" and "$"?
https://crossvine.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/20250128_0...
But I'd have to try actually swimming with it I guess. It always counts my reps in strength training pretty accurately.
Edit: But then again, if you want to manually track laps, the swimming app doesn't matter. It's only there for the convenience of not having to press a button to increment the counter. You can just copy the "other" activity, name it something like "manual swim" with the lap button enabled. The only thing that differentiates the swim activity from a regular activity is setting the pool length, stroke detection, and automatic lap incrementing. The data is still getting logged the same way as far as I can tell, so using the "other" activity would give you all the data you need to track the swim.
It should just be a case of pressing the start button, navigating to the pool swim activity and pressing start.
Use the lap button to record rest intervals at the wall, everything else is automatic
But with my Forerunner, they've packed a lot of options into the five buttons. Leads to a lot of "these buttons are for up and down, except at the start run screen where the up button opens the menu, which you can then navigate with up and down to choose between the six types of run, or exit with the back button"
If you're the type of person who doesn't like to read the manual, you're going to have a bad time.
A Pebble successor has to be better than a Pebble 2. The only reason my Pebble 2 isn't used anymore (and why I swapped to Fossil which is discontinued, too) is hardware buttons died. I tried to donor from a Pebble Classic, but sadly failed.
On top of all this, I get skin rashes from watches, so I cannot wear them 24/7.
Raymarine their marine GPS navigation units are supposed to be very intuitive, but they lack so many "that would have been nice" features, and their UX has stuff where various buttons have click / double-click / hold / hold 2s / hold 10s, all to access different functions. Some of it isn't even written down in the manual.
However, most if not all of the data (recorded activities or health data) can be viewed directly on your watch, without any connectivity.
I love these watches after moving from an Apple watch, primarily for two reasons:
1) the battery life - I cant stand having to charge my watch every day or so - my (current) Tactix 7 will go ~3-4 weeks depending on how much GPS I use.
2) (this may be out of date) when I would use the Strava or Run app on the Apple watch, it would not signal when it had a GPS fix, which resulted in a number of runs that had a "teleport" at the start, resulting in messed up metrics. Only a small thing, but it really frustrated me.
I have a withings scanwatch right now, the app is nice, ecosystem is nice - but accuracy is very underwhelming.
I would pay 1k for a watch that
- is hybrid with subtle watch aesthetic and minimal display/vibration for notifications
- has Apple watch level metric accuracy
- has week long battery life
- ideally would have replaceable battery but not a deal breaker if warranty is 3 years
I recoil at having been tempted by the more expensive Garmin watches. What a waste of money that would have been!
I honestly believe that selling them as separate products is easier. Both for the company who can focus in on the advertising, and for 99% of the customers who can go straight to their hobby.
That being said, it does look like the very first watch on their website is specifically in its own multi-sport category.
When I got a garmin smartwatch I was astounded by how poor the basic ux is in almost every single way. If I’m swimming, how do I stop my work out? The touchscreen doesn’t work because it’s wet. I have to do some sort of double click of the button. No that’s pause. Maybe triple click - no that didn’t do anything. Maybe hold the button? Now it wants to delete my whole workout.
And the GPS sync thing amazes me. I put up with this problem when I was using garmin GPSs for accurate time sync for servers back in the 1990s, but 25+ years later for them not to have figured it out when literally every other GPS device does it just fine completely blows my mind. Apple watch? I want to go for a walk/run/whatever I hit go. If I move during the 3-2-1 countdown nbd it figures it out. Garmin I want to do it I hit go, it tries to sync the sattelites. If I move during this process it starts from scratch. Sometimes the sync takes 30 seconds or so. Annoying but not impossible to live with. Most of the time however the sync takes 30seconds or so and just fails. Also annoying but whatever. Some of the time however the sync takes a few minutes and then fails. And if I move at all during this, it gives me a message saying it’s going to have to start again and starts from scratch.
And to add insult to injury the thing has a custom charging plug with the socket on the back of the watch. It has a ridge and two spikes that physically press into my wrist making it actually painful to wear. So bad.
The Instinct does not have touchscreen, instead it has a monocolor LCD that's always on. It also has an intuitive UI with just 5 buttons on the side.
I’ve had a lot of issues with this, like going running 15 km and it registers only the last 10 km. My workflow now is to put the watch on the balcony while it finds the satellites, and then go out when it’s done.
Even in heavy tree cover on a remote island for a hike last year. It (Garmin Instinct 2X) was incredibly accurate.
I've had such issues with my Forerunner 735xt (from the very start), but ever since I upgraded - or seen friends using - newer hardware, these issues have entirely disappeared.
e.g I've traced sync issues to some problem in the BT stack: forcing a disconnect/reconnect made it sync without fail. GPS was slow to lock because of low storage thus no AGPS data.
The situation with "new" hardware is completely different.
GPS lock is ~instant, by the time I get out of my RF bunker of a home I have a lock by the time I have moved the arm to press the start activity button.
Sync is subsecond usually, and takes mere seconds when it "catches up" due to phone being away from watch for a while.
Touchscreen is handy sometimes but a mere occasional bonus convenience in specific occasions: the main input mechanism is squarely buttons. I mean touch for watches is kinda braindead as an input mechanism since a finger covers so much of an area, obscuring a quarter of the screen.
UI and menu organisation felt very odd at the beginning, but after a while I started understanding how and why it's laid out this way.
It is a very alien interface at first but it absolutely makes sense, and the amount of things one can do straight from the watch is insane. I mean you can never ever sync the watch to Garmin Connect and still have a massive amount of features. It's essentially completely autonomous, something I used to great effect when their system was brought down because of IIRC a malware attack.
-The app has dark patterns like: you need to put a weight and height before you proceed with the setup, even though you can remove those later.
-Step counter quite simply doesn't work, as it grossly overestimates the count.
-5 day battery life. Not terrible, but also not practical.
-Notifications. All. The. Time. And about some "fitness goals" I don't remember setting. I have enough distractions from my phone thank you very much.
Who is the target audience for this?
The only notifications I get are when an activity gets synced, and I did not set up anything particular, it's all default in that regard.
That's not a dark pattern. A fitness watch has to know your weight and height for basically all of its fitness related functions...
Yeah, it does use a custom charging cable, but the one for the Fenix 3 was solid and since I only charged it once a week (more than I really needed to) it wasn't a problem. The Epix 2 gets charged twice a week since it has the AMOLED screen and I keep it always on and I record workouts at least 6 times a week unless I'm on vacation. But still, the charge points are inset so they're not noticeable.
If the watch was recently synced with the app to get current GPS ephemrides, it gets the lock within seconds. Otherwise, it may take much longer just like any other GPS device with outdated ephemerides.
My garmin watch needed to be synced every time and it was always slow, and my garmin GPS on my motorcycle was the same. For example I once remember it trying and failing and eventually succeeding to sync during my walk from the tube through the parks to work one morning and then trying and failing and staying failed during my walk from work to the tube that evening. I was wearing the watch the entire day, so there was no possibility of it losing lock or whatever other than the obvious, which is it is just a really terrible device. Before I ditched it entirely I totally gave up on any gps functionality - it just was too high friction for too little payoff.
Secondly literally no other GPS device that I own has a noticeable “sync” or “lock” at all. They all use reasonable heuristics to get started and then improve their resolution as they go. If they ever lose GPS lock I don’t know about it except maybe a “map glitch” where I seem temporarily to be in the middle of a building instead of the street outside or whatever. The garmin takes ages, frequently fails to sync and sometimes also loses GPS lock while I’m doing an activity, and when it does that it ditches progress and pukes in the most inconvenient way possible.
I’m not in the middle of nowhere and there are no tall buildings near me. I am in London in zone 2 so there is exceptional coverage as you would expect.
I own both the Instinct and Instinct 2, which have no touchscreen but an always-on monocolor LCD. I also have absolutely none of your GPS issues.
My dad was so impressed with my Instinct he bought a second-hand Fenix which also has none of your issues.
And all the Garmins I know have a charging port which is flush with the back of the watch.
And I believe the GPS sync is necessary when you don't have an internet connection on the watch.
I mostly use it for reading my calendar, weather, notifications and time. Occasionally I use it for exercise.
But what it also excels at is GPS. I use it as a backup navigational tool when sailing. It has also prevented me from getting lost when running in the woods a number of times.
I ask because I get directed to the Apple Watch homepage.