To the casual observer, one might assume Garmin’s biggest competitors are Apple, Fitbit, and in certain cycling circles – Wahoo. But in reality, I’d disagree. Garmin’s biggest competitor is themselves. Or more specifically, their lack of focus on solving bugs that ultimately drive consumers to their competitors. In effect, my bet is the vast majority of time a person chooses a non-Garmin product over a Garmin one is not because Garmin lost the features or price battle. It’s because that person has been bit one too many times by buggy Garmin products.
And sure – that intro paragraph might seem unfair, after all I do record the vast majority of my own workouts on Garmin products without issue. But the reality is that the ‘Garmin bugginess’ is also true, and everyone knows it. The sole reason Wahoo has slowly gained market share in cycling GPS computers isn’t because they have a technologically more feature laden or better priced product (they don’t). It’s because they have a product that seemingly has less bugs (and also as everyone points out, because you can configure your data pages via phone app).
The reason someone chooses a Suunto watch over a Garmin Fenix series watch isn’t because Suunto has more outdoors features or even better accuracy these days (they don’t). It’s because Suunto spends the time to ensure the vast majority of bugs are never seen by customers. Be it hardware or software related issues, the products are just more dependable.
Which isn’t to say these other companies are perfect. Far from it. But this isn’t a post about whataboutism. It’s not about some random bug that Apple, Wahoo, or Polar hasn’t yet fixed. Or Suunto’s site. It’s about the a cultural problem Garmin seems to have around software stability and bugs, that appears to be ‘features first, stability later’.
Understanding the Scale:
Before we talk bugs though, we do need to talk scale to put things into perspective. Any conversation that skips this isn’t really truthful. Said differently, when I evaluate the steady stream of issues that land at my virtual doorstep via comments, e-mails, tweets, and carrier pigeons, I try and question a few things (no matter the brand):
A) Was someone just confused?
B) Was this already fixed in a firmware update?
C) If this is a legit issue, then is it widespread, or a very limited edge case?
Whether or not people want to hear it, the vast majority of items do tend to fall into buckets A & B above. That doesn’t mean the company (Garmin or otherwise) is not at fault. Perhaps the product user interface was poorly designed, or perhaps the experience was otherwise ripe for failure. But if ultimately the user (even on a technicality) did something ‘wrong’, then that roughly falls into those first two buckets.
It’s that last bucket (C) I’m more focused on. There, methodology goes like so:
A) When was the last time I saw/heard of this issue?
B) What’s the rough frequency of how often I hear of this issue?
C) Is this a super rare combination of factors/environments, or something that should always just work?
D) What’s the rough ratio of units shipped to problematic units
The first three are pretty easy. I’m trying to figure out if this is a one-off, which may never be seen again, or is this something that’s happening super frequently to a lot of people.
The last question though, the ratio, is trickier. But essentially I’m mentally doing a numbers game. For example, I know that while I might see 5-8 cases of a given problem on a Garmin Edge 520 compared to 1-2 instances of a problem on an Wahoo BOLT, I know that unit sales wise, in that scenario the Garmin actually trends better. That’s because if we look at the numbers, Garmin absolutely dominates the marketplace in wearables for sporting events (obviously, Apple dominates overall sales, but we’re setting that aside from this sport/fitness focused site).
For example, here’s two major running races recently on two different continents showing Garmin wearables market share:
This is especially true the further up the endurance ladder you get. In a 5KM event you’ll see higher Apple Watch market share than in a 10KM event, and even less Apple Watches from a marathon. Garmin typically has 10:1 adoption rates compared to Apple in 10KM and above events. And compared to Suunto? It ranges between 25:1 upwards to 50:1. Polar often half of that again.
From a competitive side, no matter which continent I look at the numbers from – the other brands aren’t even close. Again, we’re just talking people using these for sport. Obviously, if we look at total Apple Watch global sales numbers, they easily beat Garmin. But the vast majority of those watches are going on people’s wrists who aren’t running a mile.
On the cycling side, things are shifting however. In some cases pretty drastically in the last year. Previously Garmin dominated at about 90% of GPS head units on people’s bikes. But in certain events this past fall and spring, Wahoo is coming in at between 15-30%. Way higher than events a year ago. A bit of that tends to be semi-environmental and race-specific. Meaning, in other regions we see them at about 10%, especially when you move towards non grand fondo events (just picking various smaller races or stretches along the side of the road).
So what’s the point?
Well, simply put: With more units in the wild you’re going to see more issues. I’m going to see on average 20x more comments about a Garmin issue than a Suunto or Polar issue. And on average about 4x-10x more comments on a Garmin cycling issue than a Wahoo cycling issue.
Same goes for forums. Garmin actually has their own forums (kudos), where people can post troubleshooting issues. And just like Apple’s forums, they’re packed with troubles. But that’s just like going to a hospital, that’s where you go to find sick people (and hopefully ways to get better). I’ve never understood the logic of saying ‘Their Garmin forums are packed with people with problems’. Of course they are: That’s the point of them. Problems happen, the point is to resolve those problems. Something that Suunto, Polar, and even Wahoo all lack (Wahoo technically does monitor a Google Group you’ll never find though). Yet similarly, nobody says ‘The Apple forums are packed with people with problems.’
So, with that bit of data-backed caveating, let’s get to the meat of the issue.
Perennial Problems:
Garmin LiveTrack.
See, you just giggled a bit.
Not because LiveTrack is funny, but because you know – just like I and everyone else – that Garmin LiveTrack is horrifically unreliable. It’s actually almost impressive how unreliable it is. I certainly don’t bother to use it. I know better. Almost every time I do use it, my wife gets more upset than if I hadn’t used it. She wants to follow me, not assume I got hit by a car every time the connection drops permanently.
And it’s been this way for years, and yet has somehow gotten worse in recent years. And it’s easy to pick on LiveTrack. But I can do this all day with other bits.
Garmin Edge Bluetooth to phone connectivity.
See, you just giggled again.
Because you know that’s a pain in the butt. You know that getting it paired can often be cumbersome, and when things go wrong, there’s more steps to the dance than the Macarena. And sure, there’s lots of reasons for some. Some technical, some just ‘because it’s the way it’s been’. None matter to most people though – it’s just architecturally broken.
But let’s go back to LiveTrack for a second. One only has to look at my Facebook post or my recent Garmin Live Event Sharing post to see that the vast majority of comments are on people’s semi-unrelated LiveTrack failures.
And I get it, as a technically minded person, I really do: LiveTrack is actually more complex than people realize.
You’ve got basically two levels of things that go can wrong: Edge connectivity to your phone (interference/dropouts such as being in your back pocket), and phone to cellular tower connectivity. At present, if the Edge to phone aspect breaks, the whole thing crumbles, usually permanently. Whereas it really shouldn’t. There’s no reason the phone can’t take over GPS position responsibilities until connectivity can be re-established to the Edge. Companies like Fitbit do a variation of this within their ‘Connected GPS’ functionality for certain devices. I asked Garmin why it doesn’t simply use the phone’s position instead, and here’s what they said:
“The phone does not perform any ‘backup” GPS position transmission if the Edge device connectivity fails. From our experience, this is typically not the cause of dropped points. Cellular network availability is believed to be the main cause of dropped LiveTrack points.”
I don’t have the underlying data that can refute that directly. However, I have never-ending data points from people. Even one comment barely 12 hours old posted to the Edge 830 review.
“Hi everyone. I have purchased successive Garmin edges…the latest being the 830. What is going on with the LiveTracking feature? Garmin heavily promotes it but Live Track has not been working for over a year!! I’ve downloaded, deleted the app numerous times, paired, unpaired the phone hundreds of times. NOTHING!!!!! It won’t even send out the Strava Beacon…let alone Auto Start The message I keep getting is “Cannot send invites at this time. Try again later.” This should be the EASIEST function for Garmin to get right being in the GPS business and all. Can someone finally get to the bottom of this. New 830, new IPhone….same old problem. Second, the sync function works only half the time….why does the Edge 830 have two different Bluetooth connections?”
Of course, I have no idea if this comment is fake. Or if the user is somehow at fault. I suspect neither though. Given our (The Royal Our) collective experience with LiveTrack, I suspect it’s an accurate and real issue. As it always has been. And in this case, they wouldn’t show up on Garmin’s ‘cellular connectivity is the issue’ bucket, because frankly they can’t even get to that point.
Now ironically, I’ve actually had pretty good luck lately with it, even while testing the new Live Event Sharing. And in talking with Garmin they aren’t seeing any meaningful numbers of failures – outside of period a few weeks ago where they had backend server issues. The challenge is reconciling that with the torrent of people saying a variant of: ‘It’s hopeless’. Heck, even trying to take the photo above (this morning) would crash my Garmin Connect app each time I opened Live Track. I’m serious.
But let’s shift to something else near and dear to my heart: Openwater swim tracking.
This past weekend I did a triathlon (race). Nothing complex, just a simple sprint triathlon where it had to track my openwater swim for a mere 750 meters. I was wrapping up my testing of the Garmin MARQ Athlete watch, which is Garmin’s top of the line $1,500 GPS multisport watch.
Yet the watch lasted a mere 34 yards in the water before it forgot how to track my swim. The next time it started tracking GPS was when I exited the water.
Now in the world of endurance sports, openwater swim tracking is among the hardest things to do. Half of the time your watch is under the water without signal, the other half it has about 1 second to gain signal and determine a location before being plunged back in the water. So yes, it’s hard. But it’s also something Garmin and others have been doing for almost 10 years. Yet somehow in the last year or so, Garmin has gotten really bad at it. An issue their competitors mostly haven’t had. In fact, Apple has laid down some of the most astonishing openwater swim GPS tracks I’ve ever seen (yet, they somehow can’t track a casual neighborhood run properly, sigh).
But my issue here isn’t my lost 750m sprint swim. It’s that I called out this issue a year ago in my Fenix 5 Plus review. Then again in an openwater swim video comparison video in July 2018. Again in the fall of 2018 in another openwater swim compilation piece. And more times privately and publicly since then. Yet it’s still not fixed. And now it gets worse, this same issue is impacting the Garmin Forerunner 945 too – where some users are reporting 4 out of 5 swims are producing data that stops tracking after a few dozen meters.
Let’s be frank: The entire point of a multisport watch is triathlon (multisport is the politically correct term to not offend duathletes, but really it’s a triathlon). And yet it fails less than 60 seconds into the main event.
In discussing this issue with Garmin this past week they believe they have a fix in that may resolve the issue. Here’s what Joe Schrick, Vice President over Fitness said this Saturday when I asked what that timing looked like for both the new slate of products as well as existing ones suffering under this:
“We are working on releasing a public beta for the GPS software sometime next week for 945 and MARQ. Pending positive feedback from beta testers and additional internal testing, we are targeting a formal release at the end of June. We are also targeting a formal release for GPS software for F5+ and 935 at the end of June.”
However, last summer they said they had fixes in for it too. I refuse to believe people actually tested this functionality prior to this past week. If they had tested it, even just swam a handful of times, they’d have seen the issues that so many others see. In noting though, Garmin says they do work with a large number of people to trial units:
“Our test pool is significant in size and consists of internal and external testers all over the world in both hemispheres (to smooth out seasonal variations). We obviously have more runners and cyclists in the test group compared to swimmers, but we are continuing to add swimmers to help provide better real-world test coverage. We are continuously refining our testing procedures to provide the most comprehensive test coverage possible before public release.”
And while I don’t doubt any of that (and I know it to be true), it’s clear that population either isn’t large enough, or isn’t given enough direct guidance on what to test specifically. It may be that population is told to just use the device like normal. Whereas when I worked at one of the largest software companies in the world, for test devices or software that I ‘brought home’ to test, we were given weekly focus areas within the device to push hard on. And almost always with incentives for the people that filed the most bugs in that section.
My Proposal:
My proposal is simple, at least on paper. In fact, it mirrors one of the most famous tech company driven initiatives to date: Bill Gates’ ‘Trustworthy Computing’ letter of 2002, sent to all employees. It was at that point that Microsoft made a significant mindset shift around security bugs/issues. Not everything was a bug per se, but rather, just a lack of focus on security. Whether or not you like Microsoft is besides the point, anyone in the IT industry will tell you the long term impact of this initiative was huge on/for the company. You can read the famed letter here.
But in particular, there are two small paragraphs that I think should resonate the most for Garmin:
“In the past, we’ve made our software and services more compelling for users by adding new features and functionality, and by making our platform richly extensible. We’ve done a terrific job at that, but all those great features won’t matter unless customers trust our software.
So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve.” – Bill Gates, Jan 15th, 2002
In many ways, Garmin could replace the word ‘security’ with ‘stability’ (or bugs), and then press send.
But it goes beyond sending a pretty letter. I think Garmin needs three things to occur:
1) A CEO driven leadership letter that organizationally prioritizes stability over new features
2) A customer-facing bug reporting site that allows people to quickly and easily send Garmin issues
3) A team within Garmin that’s specifically (and solely) tasked with proactively finding bug/issue trends and getting them resolved
Since I’ve already talked about the letter, let’s talk next about the bug reporting site.
Today when a customer has an issue, they’re required to open a support ticket. In some countries/regions that’s as easy as an online chat session, whereas in others it requires a phone call or e-mail be opened, and in yet further countries the support is mostly just a digital shrug. One reader last Wednesday reported a pile of issues to their local country support desk and wasn’t assisted on any bugs or given a replacement unit due to lack of stock in that country. While other country support desks (such as the US and UK) are really good about handling customers.
Either way, the current support system doesn’t really focus on known bugs. Mostly because the vast majority of customers actually don’t encounter bugs, they encounter general issues. So funneling them through bug triage wouldn’t help if they just had a normal support problem. But ultimately, that current support system doesn’t appear to adequately compile the frequency of bugs seen by customers – often instead just applying a short-term band-aid to get the customer going again. I know from talking with these support groups that they do consolidate the most frequent issues back to engineering teams, but it’s clear that’s hardly global and even in those well-established support centers, many times the goal seems to be to close the customer case, rather than to close the underlying bug.
If Garmin had a simple customer facing webform that allowed people to describe their bug and include relevant files/etc, I suspect that might make it clear to engineering teams where the bugs actually are, versus depending on support desks that people either don’t want to call or get lackluster results from.
Next, and perhaps most importantly is a team that has ship-blocking authority within Garmin. Meaning, right now the decision for whether or not a product (or firmware version) ships is within the product team itself. And in most software development realms, that’s a logical place for it. But Garmin has consistently proven – product after product, year after year – that those software development teams are incapable of judging that bug bar. Now don’t get me wrong: Bug-free software at the complexity level of devices Garmin is making is a virtual impossibility. No different than Apple or Samsung, Microsoft or Facebook. But, the goal threshold needs to be moved up. Right now that acceptance gate is either too low, or too short in duration to be catching the issues people are seeing.
That team needs autonomy from product group organizational charts to act as a bit of a backstop for customers, and also support. They should be leveraging support division expertise, forum posts (in Gamin’s own forums), and the sifting the internet at large to ferret out issues and hold the product development groups accountable to fix those issues in the next firmware version before more features are added or new products are released.
And I know that this sounds easy on paper and is hard to execute in practice. But it’s also not. It simply starts with organizational direction from the top of the company. Once that ball starts rolling, a cultural shift can occur. It won’t be overnight, nor will it be painless. But it can happen. It took Microsoft years for that organization shift to occur around security (albeit in a vastly larger and more complex company), but the fundamental building blocks are not terribly different than what is outlined above.
Going Forward:
It’d be easy for Garmin to dismiss this post as just a knee jerk reaction to a bad week or two of issues. After all, their Fitness and Outdoor divisions financially speaking are doing better than ever. The company is selling more units than ever before. But it’s also true they’re losing sales of more units than ever before to their competitors. Be it the obvious ones like Apple (which has arguably carved out new market areas), but also to Wahoo in the cycling realm.
It’d also be easy for Garmin executives to dismiss this post as an attempt to get clicks or views. But realistically, the views from a piece like this are inconsequential for this site in the scheme of a month’s worth of posts. Just like they could argue that James’ tweet (a very well respected cycling reviewer and journalist) would naturally become an echo-chamber of 518+ replies. But we’d all know that’s not true. We’d all know that what those 518 replies represent is paying customers’ frustrations with products they’d otherwise love. After all, Garmin’s social media team actually tried to respond to two people in that storm, before they realized they were driving their vehicle the wrong way during a hurricane evacuation.
Just like my tweet a week ago with swimming frustrations would be easy Twitter fodder, but it shows that some 59,000 people saw it, and more importantly: 13,374 people were interested in it enough to actually look at the images.
Finally, some might ask whether I’d continue to recommend (or use) specific Garmin products. And the reality is that every product is different – and more importantly, so are the alternatives. The reality is that for my specific requirements, Garmin generally ticks all the boxes better than most other products. Further, it can be challenging to fit in a larger organizational/cultural arc (like software instability) into a given product review unless that specific product was impacted by it. Or unless I actually saw that specific issue during my review time-frame (such as the case with the upcoming MARQ review).
What I hope Garmin takes away from this is that consumers want the company to do better. They aren’t asking for them to reduce their ever-growing prices, or give things away for free. They aren’t asking for more features or swankier watchstrap materials. They are just asking for the things they want to buy or have bought to work consistently from Day 1.
It seems like a simple request.
With that, thanks for reading.
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Finally the update 7.60 that I was waiting for fixing the WiFi sync issue for my F5x+. The watch doesn’t synk like before the update, ridiculous… :(
Owned the 310XT and was impressed with the software over the years. Have owned a 935 for almost 2 years and it worked great until v13.0 of the SW, and hasn’t worked right since. Suddenly it has battery issues. V13.30 fixed some of them but I am stuck in the camp that the watch doesn’t last but about a day.
Garmin clearly pushed out the v13 of SW without any real testing. Watches crashed connecting to Garmin speed/cadence sensors! The lack of response from Garmin on these fronts is what is truly damaging them in my eyes.
Without some fixes from Garmin real soon, I will be looking for another vendor to spend my $ on fitness watches. One would think for a $500 watch that we would get some reasonable service…
I am now on my 3rd Fenix 5 in 4 weeks after send the other 2 back for software issues. All 3 have connection issues where the iPhone sat next to the watch or in my pocket has frequent and inconvenient “no connection”. This issue of course means that I can’t upload activities reliably without using a computer running Garmin Express. However, that then resets my Widgets to the default order – old reported unfixed bug. Luckily that means that I won’t be able to see the Stairs widget and see how many stairs I have apparently climbed. It seems odd that when I tend to climb the stairs about 12 times every day (which I count), that I usually see 2 Garmin stairs climbed and about 37 Garmin stairs descended – Garmin seem to think I am burrowing down through the earth every day.
My strategy is to keep sending these units back until I find a working as advertised one and thank goodness for understanding vendors with buyer friendly return policies. There is a hell of a good product lurking in the Fenix 5 that meets my requirements, but it is utterly frustrating that I cannot use it to do what it says on the tin.
It is almost as if each time a decision is made (not often) to release a new FW version, that the job is passed to the a new intern with the message “well you see if you can do any better”. Owning a Garmin product is a litany of unfixed software problems that may or may not get fixed and new bugs being introduced with each update.
Amen! I got so frustrated with Garmin software and customer service I gave up and switched to Wahoo. This after unreliable connectivity and the 3rd Garmin 820 warranty replacement. They just kept shipping me units with the same buggy software.
You can say that Garmin software are prone to errors but it is also quite known that they can be resolved easily. Garmin has a upper hand in smartwatches and GPS devices due to its impeccable customer service which makes sure that all the customer queries gets resolved easily. Even though software issues like Garmin Watch face not working, Garmin device crashing and Garmin Express issues are quite common, you can easily resolve them by following the Garmin Troubleshoot guide or Garmin reset methods.
Surely not. The Standard AI Agent says erbot :-).
Bad OWS with Fenix that worked in a prevous Version is bullshit that cannot be resolved by reboot. Bad ANT connectivity to HRM Tri not, too.
My swim from yesterday
link to connect.garmin.com
Whoa Franz, your lake is warmer than the pool I do pool swim in!! Lucky you!! On Monday I swam in the sea at 14C!! That was cold even with a wetsuit.
I agree OWS does work. I’ve tested FR935, F5S with 13.30 fw as well as F5X+ with 7.10 and they all worked. I used GPS+Glonass. However, I used a Polar Vantage V on the other wrist and to me the map looks like it has more points saved for Polar, i .e it looks better, more realistic IMO, but I’m not sure. I use 1s recording on the Garmins btw.
What GPS settings did you use ? I will experiment with GPS only and Galileo this summer to see if it makes a difference. Also try F5X+ with 7.60.
Yes my lake is really warm. No wonder we have 36 degressivere centigrade Celsius. I will try out Glonass the next days. A friend recommendd that. I used my 910xt before on the other hand. And that worked perfect.
With Glonass enabled. 1 s Tracking enabled.
Change from really Bad to Bad. An improvement ?
link to connect.garmin.com
I have a Vivoactive 3. Have been happy for a year. Just when the warranty expired, I started to encounter a VERY frustrating backlight problem: the backlight always remain on, but around something like 5% light intensity. So it generates light and annoyance at night. I’ve tried everything (reset, settings such as DND on/off, auto-lock, etc.) but it remains. Anyone with the same pb?
My 1030 edge has been a pain since the day I purchased it. Sync’d to headlight and rear light/ radar, it works about 30% of the time.
So annoyed I gave it back to Mt Eden Cycles (NZ) to sort out. They have been in discussion with Garmin for a month and still no success.
Bloody hopeless support.
Anybody know how to delete old maps from Garmin Edge 1000? Without screwing up the device or bricking it of course.
I have:
Garmin DEM Map EU 2017,20
Garmin Cycle Map EU, North East, 2019.10
Garmin Geocode Map EU 2019.10
Garmin Cycle Map EU, South West, 2019.10
all activated
plus
INTL Standard Basemap, NR
deactivated
I heard that the more maps there are on the device the slower it will be.
Sooner or later a new map will come and then slowly even a 32Gb SD-card will be full.
The action is simple … STOP BUYING GARMIN PRODUCTS!!! … until they fix stuff … and they’ll understand the message if NOBODY would purchase a garmin device for few months
Hear, hear. It’s 2019. Garmin’s software quality is shameful – and negligent.
But honestly it is SHOCKING how many bugs they can pack into this tiny Garmin 45 and the Garmin Connect software. So, so so bad. Every day with it reveals another problem, another crash, another really lazy-ass-no-quality-control-at-all bug. Support lines always jammed. Chat drones make you pay with hours of your life to report issues they swear “no one else is reporting”, and then won’t file a bug report for you without demanding dumps. This will be the last Garmin watch I ever buy. I will also make it my mission to make sure no one else buys Garmin either.
I just had an online chat with Garmin UK support to discuss the over aggressive Elevation Gain (Ascent) calculation in the Fenix 5 Ride activities where the first 3 to 5m of every hill climbed, is discarded. Typically I lose about 150m of Ascent on every ride which is a show stopper for using a Fenix 5 to track my rides. My Edge 500 tracks Total Ascent perfectly and accurately.
I really don’t feel that my issue was understood and twice during the conversation I was pointed to the same general barometer troubleshooting page, that did not address the issue I was reporting, and I explained that the link was not applicable to the issue, the first time. The online chat was brought to a swift end, when it was pointed out that +/-100ft Altitude accuracy in the Fenix 5, was producing the expected results I was seeing and these were well within Garmin’s “accepted” variation. I was sent a Garmin link to make an improvement suggestion.
Rule number 1 in any support situation is to show an understanding of an issue being reported. If you don’t understand an issue then how can you hope to provide the right support to address the issue.
PS I don’t recall the part of the Garmin Fenix 5 web page that stated that the barometer based altitude sensor is accurate (or rather NOT accurate) to +/-100 feet.
That sounds like a typical GPS number. Barometric altimeters should have a few feet of precision. Whether they’re accurate or not depends on whether they’re calibrated.
Agreed. The altimeter in this Fenix 5 is every bit as accurate as the one in the Edge 500 when the altitude is manually set at the start of a ride. The Edge 500 does it from pre loaded altitudes and when you ride from home it is a brilliant system, now introduced in the Fenix 5 Plus as an improvement. Garmin asked for a pair activities (Edge 500 and Fenix 5 on the same ride) that showed the issue, and when they compared them, said they were effectively identical. When I pointed out that it was pointless to use GPS data to compare altitudes, I was guided to look at the same barometer troubleshooter link (again).
Wahoo support is just as bad if not worse for understanding the issue. At least with garmin you get a chance to escalate (you have to do it through email and it takes a while) so you have a chance of your issue getting addressed. Eventually Wahoo will just say that it’s someone elses fault, or no one else is seeing the problem, or that’s the intended behaviour and do nothing.
As it happens, about a month ago I did a ride with both my new Fenix 5+ and my new Edge 830, since the day before the 830 froze and lost the last two miles of a ride. They’re both connected to exactly the same sensors, so the only independence they have is their altimeters and GPS tracks (not speed/distance, since they’re both using the same speed sensor). The 830 gets calibrated from a POI at home, while I was unaware that the 5+ can do the same, although I think I calibrated it manually not long before the ride. Anyway, the elevation looks very close, although 5 meters difference is a little more than I’d like to see. The total elevation gain is within about a meter, so whatever the 5 is doing the 5+ doesn’t seem to be. (The Edge is the dated file.)
Other than that I’ve used the 5+ only for two hikes, and for both I calibrated from the DEM at the beginning. One of them gained about 50 ft over a 40 minute loop with about 100 ft of actual elevation gain, which I wasn’t too pleased with. The other gained about 500 ft and was within 10 feet at the start/end. Both had auto cal on.
I really do think in order to make this culture shift, the CEO and CTO of Garmin should all be fired. They only concern about the bottom line. With Garmin dominates the market share, they still think buggy devices still make the sale. They could have been made even more sales if they fix their bug. The changes have to happen from the top management. And I think those C levels guy in Garmin has been living rich for too long
Garmin also gimps international versions of it’s own already buggy firmware by further limiting region specific firmware. Eg A US 1030 is on 7.5 while a APAC version is on 7.0. Maybe you should research and add that to your article.
I’ve discussed it (and my annoyance with APAC firmware delays) numerous times, but ultimately, like i noted at the start of the article, if I tried to cover every possible thing that annoyed me, then nobody would listen. And if I tried to focus on things that other regions didn’t understand/grasp, then it’d get overlooked. Cheers!
Man, I thought this was overblown, or maybe people were doing things wrong a lot, or maybe that the new 530 would be great.
Finally left my Powertap LYC behind and moved to the future (present?) with an Edge 530. So far I’ve done three rides, one of them without incident.
The second two both had my phone disconnect. One of them it reconnected at some point, but the second it didn’t reconnect at all until I got to my office and did it manually.
Bluetooth really isn’t rocket science, especially with two devices that are large and only a few feet from each other.
This morning when I tried to commute, I couldn’t get the Strava app to open. First, the Garmin kept saying it wasn’t connected to the phone, even though the phone says it was. So I forced that and it connected, but then I got the Strava database error when I opened the app. Luckily I knew the route, but it still prevented me from getting my ETA listed. This is all with 3.5 firmware. I like all the features and the power, but man, it’s really unstable sometimes, which is super frustrating when you’re riding and don’t have time to screw around with your computer.
I would like to say that it appears Garmin have attempted to shine above competitors by adding lots of features, but features that are buggy and don’t work cause distrust with their brand.
I spent $650 on a Garmin 935 when it first came out for sale. It’s amongst the worst device I’ve owned, but I know from using other Garmins that it’s build is still among the hardware build process is among the top Garmin have ever produced. It’s buggy, the optical heart rate sensor housing cracks eventually and the altimeter and temperature fails if you swim too often with it. For this price it is unacceptable but not a surprise from Garmin.
But: the bugs, oh the bugs. Every software version has introduced catastrophic crashing bugs, recording activity bugs in which the unit just crashes at random. I’m on my fourth via warranty but treat my hardware very well, because I’m not rich and was taught to care for expensive items as a child.
Fastforward to today:
Can an old device, let’s say the Garmin vivoactive original, be used for most of my activities (even in a float for open water swimming), provide a map, use elevation correction once on GoldenCheetah/Strava/whatever website? Yes, it can.
Do I *need* numbers that show my VO2 max via suspect optical heartrate OHR implementations? No, junk in, junk out! Don’t trust a watch screen or app to show how well you have slept, listen to your own body.
Overall Garmin have messed up big style by packing watches with features, having a large range of almost identical watches (Fenix/935/945 lines) and still maintaining rubbish software.
For recording runs I don’t even use a footpod anymore. I just use a Garmin Vivoactive original for $25 bucks. The elevation is off due to no barometer, but it corrects this in GoldenCheetah just fine. The GPS times, distances and such are almost identical to the 935 and so it seems we haven’t moved so much in terms of the basics. Adding GLONAS/Galileo hasn’t improved GPS accuracy.
The lack of bugs in this means it’s more reliable for me. If I need a bike computer of similar or even a watch in future I’ll look to Suunto or Wahoo with less features, because it’s likely those features will actually work. For exact fitness measurements we need reliability, not the ability to initiate an emergency call from a watch… gimmicks are ridiculous, no mountaineer is going to use such a nonsense features, let’s be honest here.
For me brand loyalty has been destroyed with Garmin and I’m glad competitors offer more stable environments. Compare Ultratrac to Suunto’s new offering; Ultratrac is a joke and Suunto’s is actually really accurate. Says it all – Garmin don’t care.
People need to understand that if they pay by creditcard they are covered if the product wasn’t suitable and up to function since purchase.
In your case it would be easier to just contact your creditcard company who will send you a form to sign and will then refund you whilst disputing with the shop and Garmin. It’s not the shop’s fault and they won’t be out of pocket, so don’t worry about them.
I’ve just did this with my 935 and received a full refund after 2.2 years with four 935s due to the altimeters failing, optical heart rate sensor cracking and everything else wrong with them. They’re rubbish. My 70 year old rolex is still going strong and is an example of premium solid build. Garmin’s most expensive offerings fall apart even with light use. Don’t believe me? Well my last 935 sat in the box unopened for 6 months. I open it, leave it face down on a table for a week and the OHR sensor went from uncracked to cracked above one LED. Garmin’s design and build quality is shockingly bad. The fact it has improved from a decade ago doesn’t mean it’s of suitable standard now.
I used many Garmin products over the years, Watches, Pedals, Scales, and various Edge/Head Units. The watches have been reasonably reliable, but I didn’t really use them for much. The other products have all been quirky, and some have had some real problems. Because of this, I started using competitor products and won’t buy anything Garmin. I use Stages for a power meter, and it has been flawless for years. I use a Wahoo Element for a bike computer, and it too has been perfect.
Garmin’s product support has always been easy to reach and has been helpful, but at the end of the day, I just got tired of always having to call them with multiple ssues on every product of theirs that I’ve used.
I just won’t buy anything Garmin again.
Bill Shirer
Great article.. As a long time Garmin product owner and fan (currently the 935, 1030 and 130, but many before it!) …a masters in systems engineering.. and also work in mission critical applications support – I had almost no problems with any of the current devices – HOWEVER the article resonates massively!
I think you nailed it with the support portal/ticketing back-end systems which must exist within garmin – it’s a global company but a global support/ticketing system costs millions and can be like oil tankers to change out and can take years.. it wouldn’t surprise me if a project to change some >10years old ticketing system might be underway already (That could certainly be interesting question to ask them if they’re doing something there?!!)
Garmin Edge Bluetooth to phone connectivity – yes I giggled – and for some of the comments too.
I’ve tested loads of android mobiles with various bluetooth devices over the years and it’s harsh to say there’s only a problem with Garmin.
What is quite hard to figure though is that both the edge device software updates and garmin connect app updates (which come actually to Garmins credit quite frequently) as well as general phone (android/ios) OS updates can all potentially trigger Bluetooth connectivity issues for the edge bluetooth sync architecture – which I think means requiring to go through full re-pair process way more often than Garmin makes out.
I think Garmin falls a bit short here on explaining this all to the layman – it could only take some clever and more diplomatic wording on their numerous pages about troubleshooting bluetooth issues to win over those unaware about the potential technological reasoning behind having to occasionally repair.
Open water swimming – I don’t do that! Stay well away! Haha BUT a masters dissertation in underwater wireless comms still doesn’t prepare an engineer brain to understand even a small pittance of what goes on underwater with RF- it blows the minds the biggest physics brains still researching the latest developments into it – so it’s honestly small wonder if new watch hardware designs / firmware can ruin the RF performance of predecessors without a good understanding of underwater RF propagation/interference.
For me you really nailed it but didn’t mention with the ‘UNDERSTANDING THE SCALE’ picture; there are 9, NINE watches in that picture.
Each quite possibly with different hardware internals with elements designed/built by different teams/manufacturing locations and/or with different hardware components.
I imagine like you I’d love a Garmin product group owner to explain some reasons why they’re developing for ~NINE different watches in their product range all at the same time.
Same goes for the edge computers – I lost count how many edge devices they’re supporting and still sending updates for now (?!) – and I get that each serves some slightly different purpose/price point, but why not re-use the same hardware but reduce device cost by limiting the software features in the lower cost point devices.
For me the old hardware I’ve had (had the edge 8100, 510, 1000) seemed to always die long before Garmin has stopped developing firmware updates for them…
I stick with Garmin for same reasons as you mentioned.. and because I know full well that consumer grade electronics will degrade and after >4years heavy use it can’t be expected that the manufacturer still supports such old hardware – it will die same as all the other consumer grade device manufacturers hardware will die after that time period too.
Fully agreed your suggestions – change for a modern global ticketing system (that will be HUGE cost so it could go up possibly to CEO level to sign that off), but reduce the range of devices and support lifecycle for those devices too.
I’m going to suggest something to you. I think there are two Garmin camps: those who know there are issues with, for example, the Forerunner 935 and those who don’t yet know and haven’t really checked.
If you use a 935 look on the back at the OHR sensor. You may see internal cracks, weird looking marks or something may seem off. If it doesn’t happen now then let’s say you go for a hike abroad in a cooler or warmer country whilst on holiday. It WILL happen eventually if you use your watch in this way for the multi-sport function.
If you spend most of your time in an office and only use the watch for the odd run the optical heart rate sensor may never crack – but I can assure you that in time it will break, generally within the first of ownership and doing a couple of the supported sports.
We need to educate the new high end watch users to look out for hardware issues, because there is clearly an inherent design flaw with the 935, 945 and Fenix5 series.
We also need to face that *if* you use the watch for it’s designed function and treat it nicely the OHR sensor will STILL break eventually. It’s a product design fault and it frustrates me that many people claim their 935 is great and not broken when it’s simply the case that they aren’t in a specific geographic location or/and aren’t swimming, hiking, mountaineering with it.
When I seen my 945 break the OHR after a few weeks I realised Garmin simply don’t care. They just to sell units with stupid features – PulseOX is total crap and is a gimmick, it’s nowhere near a medical device status and therefore is a pointless gimmick that is not worth adapting your training regimen to. My gut feeling is men (including me) were and are seduced by this marketing and we seriously need to stop, because otherwise Garmin will keep releasing rubbish watches every year that don’t live up even slightly to their supposed marketing. $700 for a watch that is guaranteed to break and need warranty replacement twice a year? No thanks!
You’re so accurate on so many points – My Fenix 5 – Works great with Bluetooth 100% of the time… NOT! The Garmin Vector 3’s are the biggest pieces of garbage I have ever owned – And they are the newest version – I’ve had them for 3 months and they have been replaced 3 times – I can’t believe I wasted $1000 on them. Garmin should never have released them. The software updates are horrible. The people I’ve spoken to in support have all been great about replacing products but all I want is something that works. Should have gone with a Wahoo computer and a Stages powermeter..
My Fenix 5 has troubles with HRM Tri. Now have two thathave troubles thanks to Garmin support. I would like to have one that works. Problem seems to be watch. For that reason Imdid not buy Vector. I took Favero Assioma instead. Worked with no problems from beginning. Now for almost two years. I have a few metrics less than with Vector. But it is reliable. For running I have Stryd and it works great, too.
They launch a new super dooper connected GPS 66 for the modern tablet world and the only way to get a GPX onto it is to use Basecamp on a PC or Mac ! Face palm !
There are 3 of us in our running group using the 235. All 3 of us have started having charging issues in the last month. Too much of a coincidence. Especially so soon after the introduction of new models. Coincidence or Apple like conspiracy??
Yes. I hope Garmin listens too you. Can you please keep reviewing alternatives. Love your work.
brilliant post. spot on. bravo.
I’ve been a loyal Garmin user over the last 7 years in buying 2 forerunner watches for running and 2 Edge computers for cycling. I can feel the pull of the Wahoo cycling computers and it will probably be my next purchase. They seem more clean and intuitive.
The sheer number of comments shows how big issue it is for Garmin customers. I’m one of them, loyal for pretty long time, starting with early eTrex handheld GPS, through newer models, watches, bike computers, not mentioning accessories, sensors, and even Index scale!
But the issues that are plaguing me as owner of most expensive device I purchase to date – Fenix 5 Plus – and Garmin inability to resolve it – are causing me to truly think to drop this whole Garmin ecosystem lock-in I’m in. Seriously I’m thinking of selling all of it and choose alternatives. Current smartwatches are starting to provide decent level of fitness and sport-tracking (which might be not as good as Garmin is when it is working, but good-enough) and BY FAR better smartwatch experience (when it comes to this part Garmin is far-far behind Apple, WearOS, Samsung watches).
Forerunner 220, edge 520 plus, Vivomove hr, experience no issues, use Vivomove hr with edge 520 plus with ant.
Is it the more expensive products that have issues?
Is
Hi Andrew and BartMan among others,
I have FR110, FR225, FR735XT, Fenix 5S, FR935, Vivosmart HR+ and now also Fenix 5X Plus. With FR225 I had problems with GPS twice or perhaps a few more times, in my road running the GPS claimed I had taken a detour out in the sea. FR110 is slow at finding satellites but that’s just how it works. Never problems with 735, F5S, FR935 nor Vivosmart HR+. The F5X+ has restarted twice during pool swim so that was actually very bad for such an expensive product, but other than that it’s been fine.
I have a feeling I have less problems since I never use foot pods, power meters or bike things, only external HR straps of various kinds.
So yes there are quite some comments here but I wouldn’t agree that Garmin watches are error prone…
There are multiple issues reported for OWS with almost all of the above models but I’ve swum outdoors with all of them without any kind of problems whatsoever :)
My biggest issue with FR935 and F5S is the fact that Strava claims avg temp for my pool swims are 0C but I’m not sure whose the problem is, Garmin or Strava. In GC it looks right. With F5X+ it’s correctly shown in Strava.
I know this is a old post, but curious did you ever find out the problem regarding the water temp? I have a same issue, and today I told myself “I’m going find out what the problem is”…. but I thought I would start here first ;)
My Fenix 5 was swapped out 3 times by Garmin support for several reoccurring bugs before I finally just returned it to REI, where the customer service clerk mentioned I was definately not alone.
I then bought a Vivo 3, which was swapped out twice by Garmin support for altimeter issues before they recommended me paying to upgrade to FR 645.
After upgrading to the FR 645, I had to send it back to Garmin for a replacement, which came with the same Bluetooth connectivity issues as the first one had. Garmin finally issued me a refund check.
I just purchased the Edge 530 hoping that Garmin’s bike computers perform better than their watches. Reading this post and the comments has me thinking that I should return the Garmin for a Wahoo.
So, yes Garmin has some big software problems but one of the biggest draws for me is that I don’t have to use my phone to setup the data pages. Unlike Wahoo or Polar or Suunto. I went with Polar and it drove me crazy that I had to get my phone out to set the data pages or change something on the watch. I’m warming up for an interval session and remembered that I need the Last lap data and turn the auto lap functions n off. With Polar I had to go get my phone. With Garmin I just did it while I was still running. It’s the biggest reason why I will not buy a Suunto, Polar or Wahoo. I don’t want that phone tethered to my device at all times. See ya. But yes, Garmin is definitely in need of some serious quality control when it comes to releasing products with buggy software.
Get with the program Garmin
I don’t buy that. I own a Polar Vantage V and coming from three different Garmin devices (Instinct, Fenix 5 and FR945) I miss having the option to customise the watch from the watch itself, or even customise the main pages (widgets) and some other stuff.
But it’s f***ing reliable. And reasonable accurate on the information coming from the sensors. It has never let me down. I have what I’ve paid for.
It’s not just their bugginess, it’s also the fact that products launch with features missing from the software.
Take the new GPSMAP 66i for example. Contacts do not sync to it from your InReach account, and they didn’t even build in a way to manually add contacts to the contact list on the device. Basic feature available in old InReach devices.
The 66i is also incapable of receiving weather reports via satellite. Again, something which is a feature on all previous InReach devices.
In terms of InReach features, this supposedly flagship device is a step backwards! How can anyone be sitting on the Garmin product team think this is acceptable?
My usual experience with a new Garmin device is: unbox, find problem, try user forum, read manuals, call support line. Repeat. It’s the same thing every time. Even putting the previous missing features aside, day 1 with my 66i (an $800+ device in Canada) wasn’t one of joy for my new toy, it was frustration and support calls as it caused Basecamp to crash every time you plugged it in.
Kudos to DC for writing this article – I wonder if Garmin will ever invite him again to a conference!
I am surprised Garmin has not made any comments – I assume that is because they agree with everything that is written?
Anyway, I joined the no-Garmin movement – replaced the Vector 3 with 4iiii (gravel bike) – Quarq (road bike) – wahoo (for edge) and Suunto (for Garmin watch).
Everything works perfectly – not had any issues and the few times I have had some questions about any of these products I get a quick reply (do not have to wait for days).
The only product I have used from Garmin is the Edge 1000. I have had it for three years or so and it works fine. Although I do have severe issues with Live Track, and also that I have to delete and re-pair the bluetooth connection regularly. I also have a date issue that sometimes happens. It sets the date totally wrong, so that the sync with Strava breaks, and I have to repair a fit file and upload manually. Based on what what you wrote, it looks like im kot the only one then:-)
I’ve been telling Garmin this stuff for at least ten years. With specific examples. I’ve also explained to them that although they do have (or have had) the best hardware and features, their user interface is awful and they will begin to loose market share if they do not begin to address it. T E N Y E A R S.
And yet, here they are 10 years later, doing better than ever. Go figure. That’s why I think there’ll be exactly zero actual response from Garmin to this enormous train of comments.
As far as UI goes, they’re not phones. Yeah, it was a PITA setting up my Edge 830 and Fenix 5+ (which I still haven’t completed), but so far as actually using them for what they’re meant for, I can’t think of a way to improve the UI, since I basically only interact with it at the beginning and end of the activity. Push some buttons, maybe choose a course to navigate, and I’m off. Most of the rest of the time I’m just watching my data screens scroll by.
Absolutely agree – generally they produce good hardware and poor software in my experience.
My Garmin 645 Music is running software version 4.40, which Garmin Express claims to be the latest. And yet 4.4 isn’t even listed on the release notes page at link to www8.garmin.com, which says I should be on 5.7. Embarrassing!
Perhaps Garmin should get on the reoccuring revenue bandwagon and sell annual support plans that offer more reliable bug fixes and product enhancements via firmware updates.
It’s like I mentioned in my blog post, the problem isn’t just Garmin. The way I see it, the design of all of this stuff isn’t what it should be. Sure, Garmin makes good hardware with crappy software…but Wahoo makes products with ok hardware and good software. Their stuff just feels like it’s lacking something. Everyone else in this market is just kind of “meh”. Basically, your choice is a) cutting edge hardware with buggy software, b) not so current hardware with stable software, c) some else that might suit your needs but doesn’t really fit in with anything specific. Yes, Garmin sucks in their own unique way but, honestly, so does everyone else. :P
link to velonut.com
Hi Ray. I can assure you that this article got the the right ears or should I say eyes. Unfortunately it got out the same way it got in. With a pathetic internal email that we are working towards something. Something that is terrible ineffective , slow and not low on the priority list. Managers lack the knowledge on what is really going on deep down in Garmin (or they do but they turn a blind eye). They have people in the development , business or QA cycle that have no idea what they are developing , analysing or testing. It’s hilarious but unfortunately the truth.It was probably the company where I saw the most badly written code in my entire developer career (things that would be unacceptable for titles that start with “senior”)
Some things to keep in mind:
Garmin reported increased quarterly and yearly revenues from the fitness segment which negates any cry of help for things that go or went wrong during development or maintaining tasks and possible any change of making things better on the long run. Managers only care for numbers. That is a stupid thing to do on the long term but some managers became managers not because they showed skill and knowledge but because they are long time Garmin employees and made some good friends.
The entire Connect (Web and Mobile) ecosystem is rotten to the core. Management is more concerned in getting more and more features out the window with product quality always getting a second or third place.There are still people in Garmin that don’t completely understand features they worked on. If I would make an analogy it’s the same as Symbian with Android back in the days with Connect being the deprecated Symbian platform.
3) Web / Mobile / Device UX/ UI is terrible because people that are technical are put in charge of deciding what should or what should not be developed and what is not best in terms of UX. Most people in Garmin are more concerned in delivering something that ” just works” and less about having a “pleasant experience”.
4) Connect Web/ Connect Mobile does not generate money. Devices do and devices need to get out on the market and be followed by GC and GCM support. A cycle that will never end.
If you are really a friend of Garmin , don’t buy their products. That is the only way you are going to send a clear message to them that something needs to change. If their revenues go up I am afraid you are still going to see the same story years from now. As I understand this is not the first critic Ray sent to Garmin t. Any improvements? Yeah thought so.
Maybe something needs to change in hiring subcontractors that don’t give 2 nuts on the code quality as they are out after a few months or a year. Maybe they need to hire people that love what they do and not just wait their paycheck . Maybe decide on fixing issues , maybe put a hold on writing new code and refactor the existing one , maybe provide more time for quality processes … maybe maybe maybe.
As a software engineer I’ve seen that same situation before (twice indeed): big company, crappy management, unreliable products/services, but continuous revenues: EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT!
The end result? The clever minds, the people how really care and really want, giving up. One by one.
For those who are desperately asking for “a better Garmin” just connect the dots…
Bugs are one thing, feature regressions another. As some of you may know, “local http access”, a feature that was used to transfer courses from a phone to a Garmin device without requiring Internet access, has been removed with the release of Connect 4.20, disabling several third-party apps.
This was a critical feature. Yet the regression came without warning, workaround or alternate workflow.
Count me in the camp of those who regret investing in a higher-end Garmin watch.
Ray,
You’re spot-on here, really well analyzed. I will only add that there are additional confounding software issues that literally leave me wondering how the good folks at Garmin think things through, or not. I’ll chime in on 2 additional issues (of several I could note).
1. The inability to respond to text messages on the fly with an ios connected phone. Yes, I realize it’s an ios compatibility issue but from my contact with Apple tech they say there are also issues with Garmin’s software as well. IMHO this should have been worked out with Apple LONG ago.
2. Then there’s this seemingly simple feature that for whatever reason Garmin does not allow. Few people swap sensors from one bike to another (unless you’re swapping wheel sets armed with a different Garmin sensor on each set’s hub). Once you’ve paired your sensor I suspect most people don’t swap it onto another bike, and in fact may change the name to match the equipment in the Sensor sub-menu on the gps unit. Thus, the identity of the bike (sensor) is then burned into the head unit. When you upload a ride, instead of logging it related to the named sensor, and by extension the bike, it defaults to the default bike you have set up in Connect!?!?. Yes, you can go in and edit the ride and change the bike – but you have to do that extra step. Why on earth would Garmin not at a minimum offer an option to use named sensor for upload default identification? It would be more user friendly then to accurately track the total mileage on each bike you use.
For all the great mapping features (which I truly appreciate and keep me a G customer), and to some degree extremely well-done software features, omission of a simple feature such as this that I suspect virtually everyone would appreciate is bizarre.
Garmin, you can do a lot better and the market can be very cruel in a very short period of time.
Pic of the named sensors – when you upload a ride it should automatically link to that bike in Connect, thus when you upload to Strava it can also have the correct bike selected (may involve naming the sensor the same ID as your Strava bike ID, not sure about that though).
Unfortunately for #1 (iOS access to reply to text messages), that is actually legit on Apple. Apple blocks 3rd party entities from accessing the reply functionality on the text/iMessage subsystem. They say it’s for ‘security purposes’.
Android has no such limitation, which is why the feature works fine over there for Garmin users. This impacts not just Garmin devices, but countless other watches. For example, Fitbit has the same limitation, and way back in the day so did Pebble.
Ultimately, Apple’s reasoning doesn’t really hold up these days. The reason they lock it down is so that Apple Watch has a clear advantage (and it’s a big one). After all, if it was really for security purposes then we wouldn’t see them allow things like photo access or microphone access for apps (which they do).
As for sensors – totally agree (at least to the extent of Garmin Connect). Beyond that to Strava…well, that’d violate Rule #1: Which states that Strava doesn’t actually add new features. Maybe one day…
This is absolutely an accurate review from a trusted authority. I have a Garmin 520 Plus, Garmin Vivoactive 3 a Garmin swim watch and a Garmin 500. The newer stuff is horrendous. On a recent ride my 520 sent an incident notification to my wife. Incident detection was off !!! I received no notice on the 520 or my watch and repeated calls and texts from my wife were not communicated to the watch or the 520. Notifications to watch and 520 did not transmit. The Bluetooth pairing with Apple and notifications do not work and incident detection is a awful. Yeah you can go through all the steps turn off watch restart phone forget device from Bluetooth. But the software is broken. Why can upload but not send notifications. Hundreds of dollars worth of tech and I cannot get a simple message.
Sigh after a long wait Garmin released a new update for the 645 two weeks ago, so far it’s hung on me three times after saving an activity needing the power button held down to bring it back. That’s with one run a day, one might wonder if anybody did any testing whatsoever?
Needless to say I’m not the only one – link to forums.garmin.com
Opened a support case with Garmin, who sent me an article on how to reset it by holding in the power button :(
So pleased to find this post, I thought that it was just me. The only thing I’d disagree with is your comment about the UK support desk being on the ball. I’ve been chasing them for weeks over a clearly faulty forerunner 945 and so far they’ve suggested 2 factory resets (done), 3 update via Express (also done) and sent me 5 satisfaction surveys in 3 different languages. I’m just really grateful that I bought through Clever Training (thanks to your review) who are arranging a replacement for me. This is a great watch when it works. By the way, my husband bought his at the same time and has had no problems at all, just one of the reasons that I’m sure it’s a faulty unit.
I’ve had Garmin cycling and try products since the dawn of Strava and before :)
t’s a very slow roll, and much slower than I would have thought, but Apple is going to crush Garmin
Interesting about Live Track and Bluetooth pairing. Pairing works flawlessly. Not sure about Live Tracking, as I don’t watch it, but never had a complaint from my wife or any other mate who gets a copy. I did crash once and the incident detection went off. My Garmin triggered an SMS to my wife with my location (accurate), telling her there was an issue. It then left her number on the screen. When a driver who stopped to help asked who to call, I was too concussed to recite her number but did see it on my Garmin, so pointed to it saying to just call that number. So from my n=1 “experiment” Garmin incident detection works, and works very well. Not sure if this falls under the Live Tracking and Bluetooth pairing topic though.
(I haven’t read the full article yet).
“But never had a complaint from my wife or any other mate who gets a copy”
It’s at this juncture I regret to inform you that neither your wife or mates have ever looked at the link. ;)
Perhaps. Dunno. I haven’t done any testing but I was surprised to hear you and Shane say on your podcast that there were known issues with Live Tracking; I followed a mate’s Live Tracking today, no issue and I have checked mine before to see it was working. Oh yes, I have had mates track me. When I was riding in the Snowy Mountains, I shared tracking in a WhatsApps group each day and I was getting message popping up on my Garmin from people in the group, talking about where I was on climbs etc. Just my experience.
But Incident Detection works, and that’s the crucial part for me.
Thanks for the great site Ray!
Good deal – definitely consider yourself one of the lucky ones!
Garmin is working to address the livetracking issues brought up here, through a pretty significant effort and a bit of redesigning of things (that will also carry back to older devices). Expect more on that later this fall.
It does appear so.
Oh great. Go Garmin! I have had to contact Garmin Australia support a few times lately and I am SO impressed. Talk about over delivering. A little side note there.
Shall I call you an “influencer” Ray? ;-)
Fall this year? Fall which is Autumn which is March to May. That’s already been and gone…..
Garmin Fall, so, Kansas Fall. No relation to Wizard of Oz Fall. And no tie between your Oz and Wizard’s OZ.
It’s good to hear Garmin Australia support is better these days. They had a reputation for a long time as being among the worst actually (when it was all outsourced to elsewhere in Asia).
Kansas? As in the USA? But Garmin is incorporated in Schaffhausen. *shrug*
Anyway, the point I am making is using seasons is not a good universal solution to giving time frames. I hear you use season on the podcast and I then assume you mean northern hemisphere and then I try to convert it and…..well I play podcasts at 2x speed, so I just think “It’s happen somewhere between now and the end of time.”
I would think quarters are less confusing; Q2 is the same in all countries, is it not?
So Garmin Au support was not good in the past? Well from my recent experience, they are improved massively. 2 thumbs up from me.
Thanks Ray!
You hit the nail on the head with OW swim tracking. When I first got my Fenix 5 it was so much better than it is now. I did a training swim in the spring and probably covered 2500 yards. It tracked me at 750 and showed much of it up into the grass and road adjacent to the lake. It wasn’t close.
Oddly, yesterday I failed to start my watch before plunging into the water for a swim leg of a triathlon. I started the Fenix 5 in triathlon mode while I swam. The final track for the swim was nearly perfect. How does that happen?
My Edge 530 is getting replaced by Garmin due to ongoing phone disconnection issues with no fixes working. I’m doubtful that a new unit will fix it, but at least I’ll have a later unit off the line. Can’t hurt.
For what it’s worth, my yesterday-bought FR245 was stuck on the charging logo at its first ever disconnection from Garmin Express (without needing firmware update as it comes with the latest already). Backlight control worked but nothing else. Had to Google “how to reset” and quickly found the result (how surprising?).
Not a good start for a brand new product (is anyone but users doing QA these days…).
Bluetooth pairing setup was a breeze though, except that full sync failed every time, until it started to work although I had already rebooted both devices plus re-pair a bit earlier to no available. Go figure.
I noticed recently that the problem is not actually endemic to Garmin. Paris-Brest-Paris finished last week (I was a participant) and I observed that in our local randonneuring club, which has a large number of Wahoo converts, a great many of them found that with the current Wahoo firmware their devices crashed and couldn’t make it through all 1200k without repeated restarts. Much like my body, but I digress. Anyhow, for once it was the recent Garmin devices that were more solid. Maybe they’re finally tackling these problems.
Of course, Strava was another matter. More often than not Strava failed spectacularly importing long rides. Garmin Connect doesn’t mind, but Strava is a total fail for many (most?) of us so far.
Indeed, that’s been my take since I read this post. Garmin is getting the blunt of the complaints for sure but there’s a reason for that. They are in many ways the Microsoft of the industry. And, from my experience, it looks like Garmin just isn’t paying as much attention to the design of their products. As a result, stability gets lost. I’ve run into this personally. I started off with an Elemnt Bolt which was a great bike computer. It wasn’t until I upgraded to an Edge 830 till I started having lots of problems. They were so bad that I took it back after three months and got an Elemnt Roam which I’ve been perfectly happy with. Is it perfect? Nope! But the idiosyncrasies of the Wahoo ecosystem seem far, far easier to deal with than the Garmin one. As for Stava…well…that’s another discussion. Basically, the whole industry is suffering to some degree with a lack of design insight. Everything is about compromise in one way or another. Kind of sucks really.
yes I was sent a FIT file from a ROAM owner asking me to fix it for the PBP. perhaps one of your colleagues. I’m half-inspired to do that ride next year.
I mean, couldn’t you guys have stopped your devices at the end of the day? if some of your FIT files had lots of developer fields (from garmin devices) then you would have probably exceeded the strava 25mb (IIRC) size limit.
you CAN combine fit files afterwards (or at least I can)
anyway, I thought the problem was near the end when the wahoo devices decided to install a firmware update mid-ride. WiFi?
Thanks for this review,
More than 8 months I bought and been informing you Garmin programmers (beta team) about a dummy course/strava segment problem with edge 820
I don’t know if it holds true also for 830 , but for now, on 820, “Time to End” remaining is based on course/segment “average speed” and “Dist to End”, and doesn’t take into account the uploaded course/segment information!
This used to be calculated just fine with edge 305 and 810 I owned : the calculate “Time to End” was based on the uploaded virtual pacer “Time to End” and not the avg speed from the beginning of the course. It was obviously an estimation because the edge (like no one yet i guess) can predict future, but at least it would be based on history/plan and so what “time to end” remained indeed for the virtual pacer.
So now that varia radar is compatible with some Wahoo GPS, (link to dcrainmaker.com), i don’t see any good reason keeping up begging for firmware update , will just sold to the best my 820 as soon i have enough money to complete and get a wahoo elmnt, and will never come back to edge , based on the poor Garmin programming (and maths) skills and reactivity
I completely agree with you!! I had Forerunner 910XT since 2009 and Vivoactive HR since 2016. These devices worked great until last year. My peak of frustation was yesterday suddenly my Garmin Vivoactive HR had error issue (Sept 6th, 2019) and it was not the first time. It couldn’t count distance & steps (GPS active). I did the reset to default and it worked again like a charm but my previous data (the previous day – Sept 5th, 2019) was completely disappeared in my Garmin Connect Web & App.
FYI, since January 2019 I tried to attain 60 days badges point but always experienced this issue when I got 45-55 days and I had to start from 0 day again (yesterday should be my 57th day to attain 60 days badge). It had been 5 times for God sake!!
Finally I have enough and time to let go my Garmin devices after being a Garmin loyalist for 10 years. Bye, Garmin!!
all completely true. I have disappointed so many times I am seriously considering alternatives to Garmin. The same reason made me changing from PC/Windows to Mac 10 years ago – stability. I just hated to spend tens of hours with reinstalling software and fixing issues. It is not like Apple is perfect, far from that. But the same with Garmin. I never wanted to know which file contains the error logs on my Garmin device. But I do know. And I have spent so many hours with setting up my watch after a hard reset. Because you CANT save all the settings. Shame.
I’ve had issues with my new Garmin Fenix 5x pretty much from day 1. It worked fine for the first week or so – although the syncing to phone over bluetooth never really worked to be honest. But then things got worse. It started doing this weird thing where when I started a workout (run or cycle) I’d notice distance covered wasn’t displaying. So basically the GPS tracking wasn’t working. Then when I’d try and end or cancel the workout it would come up with the “Saving” or “Cancelling” screen which then doesn’t disappear until the unit eventually dies. I’ve tried syncing the unit and updating and that didn’t help. I’ve searched online but haven’t seen anyone else complain about this issue. Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks for your fantastically informative website and posts!
Christine
My wife has had issues with her Fenix 5S lately, essentially erratic HR behavior. We have tried side by side with and older edge 25 and results are very obvious. Garmin tech support has been terrible. It has taken over 48 hrs to get responses, and now that finally they agreed that unit may be faulty they only notified us that unit had arrived ( after posting) literally 1 week after that watch was delivered. We are 3 weeks counting… unit with them… no response. Much higher expectations for such a high priced item. This is Garmin Australia.
I have to agree. I am THIS close to buying another brand’s offering. I have had issues with multiple Fenix and Forerunner models. My current watch (Fenix 5 plus) is now giving me problems with the map it draws of my runs. When I upload to Connect, it puts the lap makers in the right spot but draws the red line wrong, as if it lost track of me for 3-5 miles of my 10 mi run. But it didn’t!
Forgot how to do this so used browser search to locate this text:
universal fixit site:https://www.dcrainmaker.com
Notice how the page is located identifying my prior comment, but the link does not go there.
Is there some other trick to searching and clicking through?
My latest 1030 weirdness is LiveTrack appears to be working fine (GC on phone; device shows paired with LiveTrack active) but the GPS track never shows up online.
Talk about a hatchet job. This latest update on the Fenix 6x Pro basically bricked the connectivity and music of the device. Forums are swamped since Friday, and Garmin is MUM. You can’t change headphone volume anymore, stuck on low, and the device has to be restarted all of the time to sync.
That along with new OHR issues that weren’t present. My Fenix now sits in a drawer and I’m wearing my AW5. I would return my Fenix, but it was a gift. Is there an alternative that also has music? Polar and Suunto don’t have music.
Holy smoke David, I got a F5X Plus as recently as March this year, mainly because of a larger display, but in reality it isn’t so much bigger, it’s just a bigger sized watch, so therefore I’m interested in a 6X Pro (which makes use of a bigger display in a watch the same size) but that might not be a good idea then… Sorry to hear that!
I have a TomTom Adventurer which has music :) (I don’t use music however, but it’s a watch that hasn’t showed me any bugs :) )
Thanks. I’m going to look at it now. I’m so frustrated!
The 6X firmware is apac now a month old with no pacepro, now default power modes for activities, no optical hr for swimming etc. With some heavy marketing done for those, why is such significant difference in version between regions is hard to comprehend.
Seriously, most of the people facing the same problems & also they want to know how to fix these problems. Thanks for sharing this
Do you have any more updates on the OWS fix?
3 weeks later and I returned the watch. I got a new one and turned off auto-updates. I’m leaving the watch at software version 3.0, which JUST WORKS.
My Equipment:
iPhone X
AW5
AirPods 2
Garmin Foot pod
Garmin Running Dynamics Pod
Scosche Rythme+
Garmin Tempe’
Runscribe+
All works under 3.0. All doesn’t work properly under 4.10 and 4.11. Disconnects, cut outs, you name it. It’s so unstable it is unusable.
RE: OWS
I think they’ve mostly been rolled in back in late Aug and early September, at least to the FR945/Fenix 6/MARQ – things seem relatively good there. I’ll check in though on the status across all the devices, since it wasn’t just limited to those.
I’m speaking strictly of the Fenix 6X Pro (all Fenix 6 models). I believe it’s also affecting the 945 and Marq models. 4.10 is something else! Wonders if they did any real world testing outside of AI Simulators.
I’ve emailed Garmin back and forth with phone and watch files/diags, but they haven’t replied with anything in 2 weeks other than simple info that they already have like “What is the sensor hub version you have”, which they already have. But no answers on all of the problems.
if I make it sound bad, well, it is. 3.00 is practically perfect in comparison. I’m enjoying the watch again.
FYI, the new update 4.2 for the Fenix 6 series addressed none of the major issues introduced with 4.10. The smart buyer will avoid these updates and stick with what came with the watch, turn auto-updates off.
DCR, what in the world is going on at Garmin!
I might be wrong, but after reading your Garmin reviews, I believe to understand that Garmin have separate development teams for each product. My reflexion might be naive, but that would mean to me that every team would implement the same thing and each time reinvent the wheel. I’m sure though that in reality this is not the case (it just can’t), at least I hope so, for them and for us.
It would seem to me that it would make more sense that they have development teams for features and/or types of sports and then put the required features together for each device as needed, on a modular basis.
Ray, would you have an opinion on this or clarify how it really is?
And regarding a former employee noting the terrible code quality: I’m not surprised at all. I imagine that in the early days, when processors weren’t as powerful, coders needed to take shortcuts and questionable programming techniques. As time went by and processors became more powerful, instead of cleaning up the code and have a good base, they just added features to the mess that they inherited (from themselves). Inevitably the day will come (or already came) where it becomes impossible to master the beast that they created. To me this becomes apparent with the fact that many seem to agree with, that each firmware update fixes one thing but breaks to others.
I’m a Garmin fan, and I still use their products (except the Vector 3 with which I had a terrible experience), and I hope that it will remain so. But the days where I NEEDED to have a Garmin are gone. Now are the days where I WANT a Garmin. In the future, the days might come where I need to SWITCH FROM Garmin. As I said, I hope this will not happen, but in the end of the day my money goes to the best product.
And I believe it will be easier for other companies to catch up with hardware quality than it will be for Garmin to keep the edge on the software side.
I’m looking firward to what will happen when Wahoo brings out their first watch and thus enter another large part of the market that Garmin still dominates.
Just my 2 and a half cents.
“It would seem to me that it would make more sense that they have development teams for features and/or types of sports and then put the required features together for each device as needed, on a modular basis.”
It’s a blend. They have an Outdoor team that’s responsible for the Fenix product line, and a Fitness team responsible for the Forerunner product line, and a Vivo team responsible for the Vivo product line, etc…
But these days these teams are highly integrated and share features (modules specifically) between them far more deeply than ever before. You want specific product teams to have human ownership over a product line – so they understand the ‘point’ of that product line. A Vivoactive 4 customer is by and large not the same person as a Fenix 6X Pro Solar customer. Sure, sometimes it can be – but mostly not.
But you also want the flexibility to grab those modules and pull them in. Like we saw recently with the Fenix 6 getting a bunch of the new Vivoactive 4 features. Of course, that was planned countless months out, so it wasn’t really just some accidental thing. So much so in fact that the features didn’t launch on the Fenix 6 but were purposefully held back to make a splash with the Vivo lineup a mere 7 days later. Then, those features were added back in after they had been announced on Vivo.
As for Wahoo and watches, I’d argue there’s far too much reading of the rumor mill that not. Making a bike computer is hard. Making a watch in 2019 is infinitely harder, and getting harder with a higher by by the month. I think it may be difficult, if not impossible for smaller companies to launch connected watches going into 2020, that compete with Garmin/Apple/Fitbit/Samsung/etc… primarily due to the music/streaming, LTE/carrier, and payment provider relationships. I know some people won’t/don’t want those things, but those are becoming dial-tone these days. And they’re incredibly expensive to get up and running.
Almost 3 years have passed since my previous comment. I remembered it today, while I was out running and thinking about the Apple Watch Ultra.
In the meantime, I have the Fenix 7Xss (I had the Epix before that, but returned it after 1 week because the OLED screen was too annoying), and quite happy with it. Still, I have the same feeling that I had 3 years ago. Complicated, not very modern Garmin code base, that still has countless bugs and incoherences, which take a long time to fix, and every firmware update breaking new things or even things that had already been fixed in the past. And not to forget, the occasional battery drains after firmware updates.
Also, features that should appear easy to implement and that users keep asking for, don’t see the day of light.
As I said 3 years ago, it should seem easy for another company to catch up with hardware. I didn’t necessarily suspect it to be Apple, but with their first serious move in the outdoors market, they made a huge step. Only imagine how fast it could go for them to match or even overtake Garmin with only a few new generations of their product. I see only 3 major hardware related aspects where they they are lacking behind: battery life, solar glass, and a flashlight (yes, I would not give that away anymore). Buttons? Well, they already have 4 buttons now, 3 on the main button (up/down by turning the wheel), plus the new button on the AWU.
As for software, for a global company like Apple, with a modern code base, it should be super easy and only a matter of time to equal what Garmin has to offer. I think they are able to innovate and produce updates at a faster pace, so it’s only a matter of time.
The only draw-back for me personally, as for many others, is that I am not at all an Apple-person. So as long as Apple Watches are limited to that ecosystem, I’ll likely never buy one. But they might make a move to other platforms. Producing an Android app could be sufficient.
I don’t think Garmin will disappear, but if they don’t take significant strategic moves within the next 3-5 years (maybe some kind of partnership with a company like Samsung or Google??), they might not be the main player anymore in 10 years, and they could only have die-hard-Garmin-fans as their customers. It has happened before: Garmin has lost a great deal of market share in the auto-industry, which was by far their main business. Now, Outdoors/fitness makes up for the lion’s share of their business, and it is threatened. Stock price doesn’t tell the whole story, but still, Garmin’s stock price goes nowhere but down since 1 year. In their defense, it had a big rally in the year before, because everybody has bought a sports-watch during the Covid-crisis. And I think Garmin should be thankful that the AWU only came out only now, because a lot of their sales would likely have gone to Apple, had the AWU come out 2 years ago.
Another possibility to improve the code would be to go open-source. But I think this is not possible in this particular market. In the short-term it would maybe increase code-quality, but other contenders would profit from it. The past has several times shown that going open-source creates momentum, but in the long run strengthens competitors and leads to marginality (just look at the horrible Microsoft quality in the 90s; then open-source became prominent (Linux, OpenOffice, etc.), and now MS is stronger and better than ever on the desktop and in the office domain, just to mention 1 example. Another example is the very solid and high quality Apple code, thanks to it open-source BSD base). But I digress…
Interesting times ahead.
Doubt it. One massive thing lacking on an Apple Watch (series 7 on my wrist) is ANT+. You can’t connect to legacy sensors at all. Yes, you can buy new sensors with Bluetooth, but the sensors I have now work fine with Garmin devices, so I don’t want to. And there’s no way that an Apple Watch will ever connect to radar, to a Tempe, or be able to form a light network. (For me there’s also VIRB control, but that is an increasingly niche thing and even Garmin will probably eventually drop VIRB support entirely.) Apple will show it’s serious about fitness when they support ANT+. Until then, I’ll be using Garmin for fitness, and the AW for everything else.
As for code quality, they’ve just announced an activation bug in iOS 16 that makes it difficult to get going on an iPhone 14. I’m not looking forward to dealing with that next week. So even Apple has software problems.
This article and all the comments have me considering a return on the unopened Edge 830 sitting on my stairs in a box from Garmin. I might just stick to tracking rides on my old Cyclo 505 and Fenix 1, both of which have zero reliability issues. I don’t really need to be paying good money for any more frustrations in life.
Hi Ray, it is already a couple of months ago that this post triggered a lot of reactions. Except one: a reaction of Garmin itself. Did I miss that? Or was there really no reaction? Hard to believe, but that would really show disinterest in the ”voice of the customer”.
Can you update us on the current status?
Regards, Frank
I would also be interested to know if Garmin responded in any way. They haven’t done so publicly, but I think we all wonder what their reaction to Ray was in private.
The currenty disasterous handling of the badly-flawed latest version of Garmin Connect for iOS suggests they’re learning nothing.
As a Fenix 5+ (as well as multiple iterations of the Edge devices) owner it is a source of minor irritation that software functions such as Training Focus and PacePro are being withheld from my device, which is more than capable of running them. But that minor frustration is made manifestly more annoying when we experience such basic issues with the software such as the inability to sync activities or the fact Training Load simply will not sync between devices (something they acknowledged wasn’t working properly 5 months ago but still haven’t fixed and last commented on 3 months ago).
I think many long-term Garmin customers are waiting for some sign that Garmin is learning and committed to improvement. I suspect we won’t wait forever, and the recent popularity of the Wahoo cycling computers will accelerate and many of us will be very receptive to valid competitor watch when it appears.
Regards
Kristian
Hi Kristian,
Sorry to hear about having problems. I have to say I’m surprised. I have lots of Garmins, the latest being 5X+ and I’ve had very few problems syncing or other things. Honestly the 5X+ has had the most sync problems of my Garmins but still it’s very few times, less than a handful. Not sure what problems you have with the iOS app either, mine has worked well.
I’ve had a number of discussions with Garmin about the post, though, none directly (as in: At no point were they like ‘So…that post you wrote’). Instead, the discussions have mostly been around specific issues I discussed:
A) Openwater swimming accuracy
B) Live tracking
And then some minor tangential quality related stuff briefly touched on above with specific issues.
In the case of openwater swimming for example, Garmin did seem to react pretty strongly in terms of fixing the issues. They made engineers/product folks do hundreds of swims over the summer trying to fix the issue across numerous products, and to their credit their just released Swim 2 watch has by far the best openwater swim GPS tracks I’ve seen on a watch anytime recently. That same update has already hit other Garmin watches too.
For the live tracking, it sounds like that’s a much longer project, that they said they wanted to circle back on later this year. It sounds like there were some simpler fixes that were made, and then a longer list of changes being made behind the scenes that was going to take some time. They admitted there was no point in telling me about that until they were sure they nailed it.
Which, I think is sorta the thing I said in my post above: Nothing Garmin can say will convince me. They simply have to do. They have to get better at quality.
Finally, as for the noted iOS issues – I’d be super hesitant on blaming Garmin on this one. In looking through the forums and various comments elsewhere, the overwhelming majority of these iOS issues have nothing to do with Garmin, but with the messiness that Apple created with IOS13 and changes to BT pairing (they removed all BT pairings, so everyone has to re-auth every device you’ve ever paired – which can go wrong a horrible number of ways). Whether or not Garmin could be fully prepared for that is’ debateable. I’ve been having issues on just as many non-Garmin units as Garmin units on iOS13, even including the Apple Watch.
And finally – for bits like not adding new firmware features to old watches – I think that certainly is valid to an extent. I just don’t know where the line in the sand is for that extent. Garmin adds more features to older devices than any other company – period. One only need to look at the Edge 1030 to see that, or even the Fenix 5 firmware logs. I think a lot of features people don’t realize.
Where it rubs people the wrong way is bits like the training load aspects you noted. And again, I don’t know what the right solution is there. Where ‘solution’ = both something good for the consumer, but also viable from a business perspective.
I am really angry about Garmin information policy. I have a Fenix 5 with unusable OWS. My very old 910XT is much better. I tested that with both watches on both hands. Now you write Garmin has learned and made a great swimming watch. Nice. Even the 910xt was a great swimming watch. But there is no information if there will be a Fenix 5 update. Or if I have swimming crab. Btw. The 8.0 version worked. Doesn’t seem to be a HW Problem.
Your Fenix 5 is based on a MediaTek chipset, whereas the 2019 units are based on Sony.
My understanding is both are being worked concurrently, just on different train tracks.
Thank you nice to hear.
Hi DCR,
GCM was fine until Garmin updated about 2 weeks ago. Since that time just about all Garmin Devices are about unusable with IOS. Mine loses the ability to sync all the time, weather is broken. I’ve started back to wearing my Apple Watch and am a packing tape strip away from returning this second Fenix 6x Pro.
Let along the problems the newest firmware and sensor hub caused with the WHR. It’s so inaccurate now, and unusable in the pool. I’m so frustrated with this device. Features I love, but it’s useless like this!
I’ll be honest I didn’t actually expect you to respond Ray, my post was somewhat rhetorical. I’m appreciative that you have though.
What I was curious about was, frankly, whether anyone there had ever acknowledged the general thrust of your article – namely that their increasing software instability is a ticking time bomb for their market share. As you say, actions would speak louder than words, but failure to recognise problems usually indicates that solutions will not be forthcoming. It sounds like they haven’t acknowledged it and the myriad live issues for users certainly suggests they aren’t addressing it.
I was hesitant to blame Garmin on release of iOS 13 – mainly because not one single device I had didn’t work as before after a simple re-pairing, including my Garmin devices. I heard reports of issues but it seems that after the early updates to iOS everything with Garmin was working fine. Then Garmin released 4.24.0.17…and that certainly hasn’t been fine. There isn’t a place on the internet that people aren’t screaming about that. No activity sync, no weather, no ability to log in to music services, etc.
And my issue isn’t really that it happened, these things do. It’s been Garmin’s reaction. They had reps on their users forums jumping in to blame Apple for the notifications change (which is, as you say, totally on Apple) whenever anyone suggested it was a Garmin problem. But absolute silence on the Connect issues…which they’ve now admitted they knew about for at least 5 days before their Product Support team were still telling customers reporting it that “we haven’t had this issue reported to us”. If they’d owned it early and said they were working on a fix then it would have been a minor inconvenience for a week or two, and quickly forgotten thereafter. Now it’s a major issue of lost trust.
I have to categorically disagree with you about Garmin adding more features to older devices. I’ve seen no evidence for that if I’m honest. In fact, I think Apple has a much more demonstrable track record of introducing new software features to devices capable of them over a much longer period of time. I would also argue the reason the Edge devices seem to have benefitted more than the watches is because there is genuine competition there with the Wahoo devices. On the watch side of things, it’s really only the Apple Watch and I definitely don’t see that as a comparable device for the purposes of most Garmin customers.
I could handle the withholding of Load Focus, etc, from the 5+. I might not agree with it, but it would be what it is. But the fact that also owning the 5+ means the feature redundanr on the Edge 1030… that’s unarguably a nonsense. Likewise silly things like Intensity Minutes. Have one Garmin device with that feature, it will work. Buy another Garmin device that doesn’t and you literally lose the feature on the device that’s supposed to have it. That’s not a business model, that’s madness. Garmin’s base logic that users don’t do activities, devices do is the root of that and it shows just lacking in customer-centricity their approach is right now, if I’m honest
Thanks again for replying, and for all the excellent content over the years.
Regards
Kristian
I’m glad, and honestly amazed, you’ve avoided the sync activities with Garmin Connect, Jens.
As I said above, there isn’t a place on the internet where people aren’t reporting it. And after eventually speaking on Friday to a senior manager in Garmin U.K., they themselves acknowledge that the problems are widespread (she wouldn’t confirm it was “universal”, but did say “many, if not most, users” are affected). Likewise the Wi-fi issue that they’ve hastily release firmware updates to try and fix.
As I said to Ray above, the fact I can’t see weather on my Fenix isn’t a big deal to me, a couple of weeks without updating my Spotify playlists really isn’t a drama. Having to wait until I get home after work to plug in and sync activities for a couple of weeks, meh who cares. If Garmin had been open and up front as soon as they knew they had a major issue, it would have occupied my brain for minutes at most. Instead they hid from it, they lied to users who reported issues and they allowed customers to spend precious hours trying to troubleshoot and fix fixes themselves when Garmin knew fine well that they couldn’t. That’s where they’ve breached my, and many others, trust and that’s a problem for me. It’s not the first time I’ve been lied to by a Garmin rep but despite having owned dozens of Garmin devices in the past, I can’t see myself giving more money to a company who treats it’s customers with such contempt.
Genuinely that saddens me because they do make fantastic hardware. But the software issues highlighted by Ray, and more importantly the lack of trust, really more than out weigh that. I don’t believe in giving revenue to any business that won’t stand behind its products.
Hi David-
Yeah, 2 weeks ago is probably when your phone updated to iOS13. :) Everything you noted is consistent with that.
Things like activity sync are part of that, it’s all part of the sync. It’s a good reason to also configure WiFi on your device – so at least that stuff goes out that way.
RE: Kristian-
It’s interesting – I noticed on Garmin’s support page last night while looking up reference for something else, that they’ve basically got a banner for iOS13 that shows up on every page that pretty much says ‘Got issues, call us, we’ll get you righted’.
I do agree with you though on communications. It might have behooved Garmin to send out an e-mail to iOS users (they know who those are), or even a push notification from the GCM app, or something, that basically says the same as that banner: ‘Got issues, call/chat/text/etc us’, along with a help page to quickly get people sorted.
For adding features to devices, I think the challenge is comparing to Apple every time. It’s a different business model, despite both selling watches. Apple mostly cares about your revenue via phones (and now services). Garmin doesn’t do either. Doesn’t necessarily make it right, but, it is what it is. I’d like to see Garmin commit to some sort of product cycle of ‘2 years of updates for everything physically possible from a hardware standpoint’.
In any case, check out the Fenix 5 firmware listing as a good example of just how many things have been added. And sometimes a single line item is really like 10 features behind the scenes. link to www8.garmin.com
Thanks again for replying Ray.
Yes, the banner is there. But absolutely none of the steps they offer fix the new issues introduced in 4.24.0.17. They may well fix other issues, but they don’t fix those… Product Support, when they finally admit the problem, also admit there is nothing the user can do but sit and wait for then to work out the bugs in the Connect app and release a new one.
Precise words from “Chris” in that team: “it looks like our engineers are still scratching their heads…researching what went wrong with the new Garmin Connect APP [sic]”. They know that 4.24.0.17 caused issues over and above the ones the banner was put up for. That banner you reference was up there before this release. As you say, it would be easy for them to contact affected customers and warn them not to waste time trying to fix things. And if they had, few would have lost a moment’s sleep, they’d just have waited for the fix.
Regarding the new features, I agree with your 2 year cadence, for what it’s worth. And I wasn’t actually comparing Garmin to other manufacturers, until you did. But as I said, even if Garmin said they weren’t going to offer new features at all after launch then consumers could make their own decision. That’s acceptable to me, even if I don’t agree with it. I’d like PacePro, for example, but it wasn’t a feature of the device I bought so it’s acceptable not to have it.
What’s not acceptable is *losing* features, such as the ones I mentioned above, because I’m a repeat customer. Honestly, no one at Garmin – if they thought about it for 5 minutes – could possibly argue that it’s reasonable to render some features of a device useless because a user buys a second Garmin device. It’s utterly ludicrous and I would absolutely love to hear them try to give a rationale for that. My efforts with Product Support have yielded an “it is what is it” response.
If I only used an Edge 1030, then I’d have Load Focus and Exercise Balance. Because I have a Fenix as well, which I use for running, those metrics on the Edge are useless as they don’t incorporate data that I have synced to Garmin and the device. If I only had the Fenix then I would have Intensity Minutes, Stress, etc.; but because I use the Edge for cycling, those metrics are useless as they don’t incorporate data synced to Garmin (and the device). Those are just examples, but can anyone possibly justify it? It’s not those metrics per se, but the principle.
Again, thank you.
Kristian
Blaming Apple? For what? Garmin has the chance to solve the bugs for lots of months. Many people where complaining about the bad state already in the beta. Answer: This is a beta version. It will be fixed on time with the ios 13 release.
What happened? Nothing. Blame Garmin instead of Apple
Exactly Vallari,
Garmin Connect Mobile for IOS updated last night. Guess what, the big problem was not fixed. Sync breaks again, and no weather. 3 weeks of this BS.
I have no problems with my other non-apple devices, including formSwim goggles that sync, Runscribe+ that sync, of course my Apple Watch just works.
There is absolutely no excuse for the poor quality that we are seeing, it’s going downhill in a spiral, very fast. Garmin doesn’t care, they care about the bottom line and with the new product releases, i’m sure they are rolling in the dough, so everything is good, right?
I’m at a boiling point here with these problems.
Good Morning Ray,
Ok, we are going on 3 weeks now with GCM being broken. Along with a slew of serious problems across all product lines with the device firmwares. I have honestly never seen things so bad.
I really don’t know if this is a hole Garmin can dig out of. There is absolutely no excuse for the lack of communications, disconnect between the support people and the programmers, and quality of the programming.
I don’t see how anyone can blame anyone but Garmin. I’m back to using an AW5 and just gonna be happy with a device that JUST WORKS. I’ll miss the advanced data that Garmin brings, but it’s not worth it if you can’t use it!
Do you have a Garmin support ticket #? I’m happy to take examples where people have tried contact support for help and are either left in limbo – or aren’t fixed.
I’ve had few problems with GCM, mostly because of the Bluetooth problems that iOS 13 caused with multiple devices including my AW5. I happened to check the weather on my Edge 830 during a ride yesterday, and it was there, which usually isn’t the case if I check before a ride (it seems to be delayed a bit; of course, before a ride I just check on my phone). I uploaded photos using GCM after my ride, and it worked fine. It’s certainly not my primary way to upload rides (WiFI on an Edge 830, or plugging it into my Mac if that doesn’t work), but it’s been working about as well as ever except for the connectivity problems.
DCR:
I’m also pretty frustrated. This has meant that I’m being forced to travel with a laptop in order to sync activities right now.
My Garmin support ticket number (as you asked) is 15163882K1
I have 2 that I’ve given up on.
15151092k1 and 15136395k1
Even the outdoor Beta team (I’ve emailed them) ask for my logs and never get back about a fix. Just keep referring to old “fixes” that don’t work.
Thanks – can you clarify region?
Hello Ray. Southeastern USA. (South Carolina).
UK in my case.
Interesting article… Garmin has a lot of software instabilities.
Is there someone who has a license of the fit file repair tool and can help me recover a fit file from a garmin device? Greetings Kristof
Thank you for your spot on article. Thought i was the only one having issues.
I programme my workouts on Garmin App. but i won’t get all the workout sync into my watch. Help center can not figure it out too. They can not help. It is frustrating and i am looking into other watches now.
Thank you.
I’ve come to the conclusion, even though I don’t want this, that the AW4/5 will serve my purposes. It just works and works well.
I really wanted a rugged watch, but this experience with my Fenix 6x Pro has been horrible, utterly horrible. HR issues, connectivity with my running hardware issues, SPO2 issues, Music issues, sync issues. Just completely unstable.
WHY would anyone want to blow 800+ bucks for these headaches. Garmin has gone downhill by a large margin in the past few years. My Fenix 3HR was fantastic, so I decided to give them a try again. Sorry I did.
I hear you, however the AW4/5 does not have the battery power for those long duration events. Also the start stop and pause can be tough as they are not buttons. That said, in every other way, the AW is a more sophisticated device. Also the sensors are significantly more sensitive and GPS often better (minus the trade mark Apple smoothing).
If Apple had longer battery life I’d probably switch back. It’s literally the only thing holding me back right now.
Apple could make out like a champ if they released a “rugged sports watch” with at least 3 days battery life. Not so much fashion, but sports and outdoor type. The battery life is a pooper, and I’m honestly shocked they released the 5 without increased battery life.
The elephant in the room here was mentioned by FormerEmployee above.
Garmin high end products contain features that don’t work properly. On the Fenix5, 935 and 945 I’ve had the optical heart rate (OHR) sensor cracks in time. Rather than use glass or composite they use plastic, so it cracks after some exposure to normal cool and warm temperatures in the UK. Northern UK isn’t hot and has less temperature fluctuations than the US and central Europe.
Given that they don’t just admit there’s a problem but instead just replace devices, when it’s known the replacement device will of course eventually fail, is very weird and shows they only value selling devices. Lots of new Garmin customers have zero idea they’re purchasing a flawed design. In fairness even Ray here has suggested it’s the user or an unlucky device hardware they received, but this is factually untrue. I can take anybody here with a 935, fenix5 or 945, use it in northern England and the OHR sensor will eventually break. That’s crazy bad design! Garmin then said the watch isn’t affected in waterproofness or operation; nonsense! The cracks do lead to leaks (happened to me) and all the 935 features, such as VO2 max calculation, resting heart rate, that differentiate from their lower and cheaper models are based on the OHR sensor.
I’ve won in the end by switching to a vivoactive, the original tiny model Garmin produced. Got it on gumtree for £25! I’ve sold my 935, 945 and Fenix5 in the last 2 years, thankfully not losing too much money, and will not purchase another Garmin until they resolve their hardware and software issues.
The 945 and Fenix6 series retail at £500 to £900. Imagine if your mobile phone cost this much and had bad hardware design, frequently broke; the company wouldn’t be in business much longer. Samsung have had a hard time the last few years but the only only ONLY way is if we all collectively start a class action lawsuit against Garmin – who are only concerned about marketing and selling more devices – and switch to other products or older Garmin products with no/less flaws.
Me paying £800 for a fenix6 pro premium isn’t feasible when I know that the GPS chip is rubbish and I can’t swim easily with it. The build quality and software are questionable. If you seriously are ok spending this every two years on Garmin products that fall apart, break with careful daily use then I suggest you are a fool, money, easily parted.
Ray, I also expect harsher criticism from you on Garmin and the fact that there is clearly a rampant OHR sensor problem that breaks half the features of these higher end watches. Apple, fitbit and the rest don’t have this problem, but it’s important to recognise that even just using a 935 for a few swims results in the altimeter/barometer beginning to break and fluctuate much more than with zero swims.
To be frank, I expect more university style analysis and comparison using empirical proven data rather than not stating what is plan to most experience Garmin high end watch users: the products are lower quality now but better marketed and can’t withstand triathlon use without something eventually breaking. My last 945 and 935 didn’t even get used much and the OHR sensor cracked whilst it was in the house at home.
If Apple, Samsung and Suunto had as many hardware and software faults as Garmin they’d be embarrassed and people would stop buying them. Speak with your money people!
Ray, maybe you are following the Garmin forums and specifically the bug that has stopped pretty much all devices from uploading activities from iOS right? I am not sure if it has hit your Garmin/iPhone but my FR235 on iOS 12 has stopped uploading for weeks.
I tried to install Garmin Express (yes, back to the last decade) on my W10P laptop to upload through that route, but the installer ended up throwing an error too :)
It is pretty clear that no-one at Garmin is listening or understanding in how much software trouble they are. This sort of “technical debt” only gets worse in years to come unless they drastically change things …
I found this while waiting on Garmin’s chat for 30 minutes and couldn’t agree more. They’re getting worse every year. Why does my watch get insane amounts of firmware updates? Sometimes they come every other day for a week … obviously because nobody bothered to test any of them before releasing them.
And the best one … why would I be waiting for 30 minutes on their chat? Because I tried to download Express from their website but the link was broken. The girl on the chat couldn’t give me an alternate link … all she could do is tell me that I had to wait for tech support. While I was waiting, I had some time to follow all of the random links to “download” Express … which ends up in a circle of webpages with paragraphs titled “how to download Express” that don’t tell you how to download Express. It’s pretty obvious that Garmin has outsourced its web development to a non-English speaker in a third world country. The grammar is pitiful and the structure is bizarre.
Anyway, that’s it … I’m done with Garmin. I’m just sad that they are going to ruin InReach too.
So Garmin have just issued a new firmware for the Fenix 5 which is the first in a couple on months. Reports of bugs are soon appearing on the F5 forum of increased battery drain, button response lag, HR not working, more , yes more connection problems and RTL language devices being reversed. This just keeps happening and happening with every new firmware update. This is a continuing sorry state of affairs.
Either they can’t fix it, or don’t have the resources to fix it. I gave up. I returned my 6x pro and am very happy with my AW’s.
What makes it worse is the 5 or 6 beta versions of the firmware beforehand and with the final release being something completely new. No wonder the new firmware has been pulled from public.
You hit the nail on the head….continuing sorry state of affairs.
So Garmin have actually pulled this Fenix 5 firmware! That just takes the biscuit and proves that they do not do enough testing before releasing updates. Unfortunately like most Fenix 5 owners it is too late, as their devices have already updated to this problematic v15 of the firmware. Mine certainly has this new firmware and I kick myself (yet again) for not turning off the dreaded auto update.
I can’t help noticing that Garmin have not issued a. an apology and b. any instructions on how to downgrade to the previous firmware. In fact they have not even made a forum announcement that this firmware has been pulled and just think they can get away with pulling it and hoping nobody will notice.
I bought a Drivesmart 55 MT-S earlier today. I connected it to Garmin Express on my iMac to install the latest software and map updates but the application repeatedly crashed. Then I found this thread: link to forums.garmin.com
Returned the device to the retailer for a refund. I won’t be buying any more Garmin devices for the foreseeable future.
You saw a thread from seven months ago and returned the device? You didn’t try updating to the current version of Garmin Express first?
Yes I was using the very latest version of Garmin Express
I’m in general happy with my Fenix 6 Pro, but more and more annoyed with all these small but unforgettable bugs that I find on it week after week. Those kinds of bugs (does Garmin really test their watches? I doubt of it according to the bugs that I can simply find) shouldn’t exist on watches of that price! And the support of Garmin (Belgium) is awful and give you constantly the impression that their purpose is to close the incidents as soon as possible and to sent the ball back to the client, with or without solution, it doesn’t matter apparently. My Fenix 6 Pro will probably be my latest Garmin watch. Garmin must do more to win and conserve the trust of their customers, what they are now doing is far from sufficient!
bought a 945 last week and here i am.
Owner of Garmin watches since it was a rectangular block on my wrist, and have 5 devices actively used in my home currently. Lots of issues with their software over the years … BUT I might finally be at my whits end with them.
My 935 hasn’t connected to my iPhone for a week. Turned on/off bluetooth, deleted watch profile, deleted/added app, stood on one foot and barked like a dog. Nothing works. That company needs to cut the crap and figure out this garbage software.
What should I buy for running, swimming and cycling if Garmin is off the table? Also for my kids that mostly focus on running? It’s nice if we can connect together and have friendly competitions on steps, runs, etc.
I decided to go to the no Garmin route. Got rid of all my Garmin stuff (bike computer, watch, power meter). bought a Suunto watch and never had an issue.
If I use multiple devices from different companies what is the best way to gather all my data on one place? If I use only garmin I already use garmin connect to view my historical data. If I want to buy wahoo bolt I have problem because I have to use another website to store my data. Is there any good software to use to save all my data and to be able to switch products/companies ? Strava is not that useful I don’t like it. Also I would prefer an offline application.
Strava
With a Wahoo, you could set it to export your rides as FIT files to something like Dropbox. From there, you can use those FIT files however you wish. One option, which is totally free, is GoldenCheetah (https://www.goldencheetah.org). However, keep in mind that it’s not as user-friendly as some of the commercial options and does have a bit of a learning curve. I’m sure there are other options but the main thing is making sure that you set your Wahoo app to export out all the rides to another location.
I tried Golden Cheetah and it really wasn’t my cup of tea. I know it’s open source but I can’t write a single useful line of C++/QT even if my life depended on it. Do you have some pointers to commercial software?
There are a number of solutions but your mileage may vary. The problem is that most of the best solutions are all cloud-based. The reason is that most people want access to their data across multiple devices. Most software solutions that run on the desktop don’t do that all that well. I personally use a combination of Strava and TrainerRoad, with the later providing me with a nice calendar to organize and track my training schedule. Here’s a few though that I found online:
https://runalyze.com
http://www.gpxsee.org
link to turtlesport.sourceforge.io
link to trailrunnerx.com
These are all free solutions. Probably not what you’re looking for though. :P
ned the 310XT and was impressed with the software over the years. Have owned a 935 for almost 2 years and it worked great until v13.0 of the SW, and hasn’t worked right since. Suddenly it has battery issues. V13.30 fixed some of them but I am stuck in the camp that the watch doesn’t last but about a day.
I have thought a similar thing for years. Glad you said it in this article. Love your honest and always comprehensive evaluations.
Since here some comments are about right or wrong “incident detected” messages,
could anybody being well informed, please, be so kind on what precise criteria an “incident”
is being determined to have occurre in the first place.
It is information I am unable to find in the consulted manuals at all.
Hi! So, is it purely a software issue, that could theoretically be solved completely with a fundamental update?
The way I understand the critics, that is not likely to happen?
I think of buying a new bike computer later this year, so still have time to see how things evolve. Had the Lezyne Mega XL, which was a disaster. Will be using my Apple Watch and iPhone for the time being.
Ease of use, reliability, battery life are all obviously important. For me, navigation and training features are crucial. I’d prefer to have a bike computer with which I can build interval sessions, plan in advance, etc, preferably without a paid TP plan, or similar. The number of paid subscriptions we need for all kinds of services nowadays, is crazy. And I do not need the advanced metrics of TP currently.
I understand that Garmin offers such training features. How buggy/reliable is that?
I do think it’s getting better. Slowly, but it is getting better. Be it specific issues (they’ve spent an enourmous amount of dev effort since this post on LiveTrack), or more general QA across products.
I think most people that have bought products over the last year would say that they’re happy with them (specifically looking at things like the Edge 530/830, Fenix 6, FR45/245/945). I think it’s fair to say Garmin is increasing quality levels. They’re also clearly letting products spend more time in beta (private and open). And I can easily say they’re actually holding back product announcements now aren’t tested/ready, whereas before it was largely hope for the best post-release. That’s likely why you’ve seen less Garmin product announcements since late last summer (as in, none).
That said, there’s still work to do of course. Be it on bugs specifically, or just ease of use feature type stuff (e.g. the oft-cited example of configuring data fields via phone instead of only on unit).
Tnx, interesting to hear that. I’ll keep an eye on further developments, then. I think at this stage the Edge 830 and the Elmnt Roam are most interesting for me, depending on how things go.
Hey!
I keep coming back and reading your blog because it’s great.
On this topic I would like to ask if you have experienced a difference in training load between devices when all are synced to Garmin connect. I guess Garmin at least pay some attention to your blog so I hope that they see this and start shaping up soon but it’s truly annoying to see different figures pop up just because you used a different device…
Yeah, it’s messy. Super messy.
I sat down with them for an hour or two one day when I met them last, and we walked through all the scenarios and where things can break – primarily due to years of different levels on different devices and sync scenarios. My head hurt way more after the meeting than before.
I think things are slowly getting better, but they’ll be the first to admit their heads hurt just as much as mine on this one.
Appreciate the reply. And for some reason it feels like youre like a spokesperson for a full community of end users, so really appreciate you shouldering that responsibility…
I agree that things have improved the last year or so (albeit from a low base). Here’s hoping they keep this focus on improving software/user experience for some time until its closer to where it should be… :)
Still the same … the bugs in the Forerunner 45 drive me crazy. From not turning on, to having trouble acquiring a GPS signal, refusing to connect with the phone, spontaneously reinitialising, to recording completely wrong heart rates, to suddenly switching to miles and pounds after a software update ….. come on Garmin, I know this is your basic running watch, but that doesn’t mean the software should have that many problems!
I am so sick of Garmin. Latest update lost my watch face, and now if I do not sync at the end of each day, the entire day’s worth of activity tracking, step count, etc. is lost. My watch is actually useless for its primary function now, and it is so incredibly frustrating that I work hard to achieve training goals and the data just disappears.
No response from Garmin on the issue and it has been going on for weeks.
Thanks for posting, and I agree as a longtime Garmin customer. The only product of theirs I have had that “just worked” was my old Edge 500, the 810, 820 and new 830 I have all were unstable out of the box. The new 830 (about 1 month old) won’t turn on reliably and I have to reset it almost every time after turning it off just to get it to turn back on. It has other bugs too, but I’m done typing about this. I think I will return it and try the Wahoo equivalent instead.
And there is one more things to mention, it’s already 2020s year, and Garmin doesn’t support CJK character(intentionally) if you brought device from US/EU market. And you have to buy it the Asian version to support it.
Help needed – I’ve been a lifelong advocate of Garmin devices and have taken the plunge on another one, namely the new Edge 830 to replace an ageing 800.
Really looked forward to the TrueUp function with my Fenix 5 however it now seems I have 2 training statuses. Not run in the last week due to injury so fenix5 status on garmin connect shows load low etc and “in recovery” however I have been riding with edge 830 and so its status shows “productive” and high load .
Why, why why are they not synched / combined to give a single training status – am I doing something wrong – all have trueup selected and on GC. Or is that another of the very frustrating differences between garmin marketing and alternate user reality, any help appreciated.
Really good question GreenfieldR,
I have several watches and use them irregularly and I get the same problem, training status from 3-4 devices at times, despite having enabled TrueUp…
Not sure if there is a solution!?
I’ve had the 830 since it came out, so just about a year now, and I have a Fenix 5+. Physio TrueUp has never worked very well. Since I’m currently running the 5.44 beta on my Edge and had some trouble with ANT+ (which seems to have been fixed by a reset) I’ve been carrying and using both my Edge and Fenix for the past few days. The training status is completely different for the same ride (same sensors), so I’m not actually sure I want them to true up, anyway, since they seem to be using different algorithms. (Not that I’ve ever cared much about those training numbers.) It does correctly show the latest activity on my Fenix in the widget, and that’s about as far as it’s useful to me.
Have replaced a Garmin Edge 1000 with a Wahoo Elemnt Roam and i’m very happy. Wahoo Roam works and do that what i ever expected from that gadget. I have used Garmin over 15 years.. and always frustrated. I’ve been somewhere and want home, Garmin loses. The same with Wahoo: Fullfilled my needs and i was really suprised. Sure, as local i used some other streets, but doesnt matter. Wahoo takes a good tour and have all featuers i expect. Garmin has nice features, but .. who needs them?
And.. nobody knows if the features on Garmin works as expected. All i have to say is:
Not one second i have regretted the change to wahoo. The Roam did what he should and what i expected. The Roam makes fun and all the features works. Big recommendation.
To this date, all of the newest watches Garmin are still crap when it comes to HR values outside of a started activity. I gave up. 8 months to fix this problem and Garmin is dead quite. You simply cannot rely on the data from a Garmin watch anymore, except when you are in an activity. Even then it’s slow to catch up.
Ray,
How can Garmin even consider this acceptable. Doing this to save battery life is unacceptable. So much of the data we rely on for our health is computed by our heart rate, 24/7, not just in activities. They need to kick up the sample rate and power to the HR sensor. This problem didn’t exist with the release firmware of 3.1.
link to forums.garmin.com
Glad I chose to stick with my AW4 for now.
Wow. Great thread. Thanks. I bought a vivoactive 3 last year to see how useful it was before shelling out significant money for the watch i thought i really wanted, a fenix 6x.
So this was a cheaper proof of concept for me. I love the watch and it’s features but I’m frustrated by losing my watch face occasionally and also it sometimes for no good reason not recording steps or sleep.
So i have stopped using it and gone back to my mobile for recording steps as that just, well, works!
I’m so glad i didn’t buy the Fenix!
I have a Garmin Edge 530, which I’m unable to pair – no matter how many ways I try – with my iPhone. As a consequence, features that were amongst those considered when I opted for this device, such as message alerts, weather alerts etc, just don’t work, let alone not being able to upload to Strava other than when I get home and connect to WiFi; I’m not alone here, the forums are full of similar comments and gripes. Trying to get any support from Garmin is a joke, no fault of the people who have to answer phones and mail. Given that Garmin have had connectivity issues as far back as the 520, which they never got around to fixing, I’m probably just going to give up, burn the money I’ve spent, and try a Wahoo
It all could be said in short – as Garmin seems to be highly professional in hardware so it seems to be quite amateurish in software – due to a lack of highly professional system architects – at present they are not able to provide even an installer that works in a standard way as everybody is accustomed to – you cannot be sure to securely reinstall the product – either the Garmin Express or the Garmin BaseCamp – giving the message ” … is already installed” but you cannot find the …exe program, and vice versa, when you are unlucky and experience some problem during installing or uninstalling I bet you you will need to reinstall Windows – this software is just a crap
Are Garmin watches not based on Linux? It should be possible to get sport sensor data onto the new Linux Pinephone, to build a new watch, which eventually later on could be ported on a smart watch.
Has someone already reverse engineered a Garmin watch? I was searching in the web for it, I found only small little projects for changing some parameters in the watch. I m suprised about this. Sometimes reversed engineered software is better than the orignal ones, see custom ROMs of smartphones.
Took apart an old one and it was an NXP microcontroller, not anything that would run Linux
Hi all
Need help with lost Forerunner 45 activity. No response from Garmin support after 2 weeks. Undertook two runs 2 weeks ago on the same day. Only one synced. I certainly saved the other. The weekly running totals (on the phone) seem to have included this. Have tried connecting to USB and the run does not appear under Garmin activity on my computer. Where has it gone, as it appears on the watch weekly running totals but not Garmin connect running totals? Please help?
We love the Garmin devices and the reliability of the Garmin but the main issue is the update problem but other wise its great i feel the same issue on my Garmin device so i update my Garmin on Garmin express and it gets the new update and now its great
I bought an Edge 530 Bundle based on your awesome video. I wish I read this post before buying as there have been nothing but issues since day one.
1. Heart Rate Monitor was missing.
2. Device wouldn’t pair with phone.
3. Device was paired with different sensors than the ones in the box. Took awhile to figure this out.
4. Speed sensor didn’t have the battery holder clip installed right so it wouldn’t power on. (If I hadn’t noticed the clip had three tabs and the battery back had three tabs I would have thought it was broken. They weren’t aligned.)
5. GPS couldn’t locate satellites. Found a single comment on Garmin’s forum and had to manually install a file to reset the GPS finder.
6. Live track drops.
7. Strava Segments get stuck on the countdown window. Garmin Support can only reply at most once every 24 hrs so I’ve been dealing with them for a week and still at square one. Now they want me to make videos to escalate to their engineering team.
8. sone Strava segments start and stop in the wrong locations. One of them, which happens to be my fav segment, starts and ends about 45m ahead of where it’s supposed to. This means it now ends in the middle of an intersection and can’t reliably be raced.
My experience probably is worse than the average persons but I’m seriously considering getting an Element Bolt. I’m fine with less features if they all work.
Thanks for all your videos and reviews!
Seriously, take it back and get a Roam. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. You’re not the only one who has had issues with the latest Edge units. I had problems galore with the 830. Just not as stable as the Wahoo ELEMNT units. I talked about this on my blog a while back:
link to velonut.com
I bought a garmin edge 530 a year ago. Just like you say the garmin/phone connectivity is a real frustration. Just can’t get it to work properly. This means that the live tracking is just a big joke. Another huge frustration especially for my wife wich make it one for me to. I find myself explaining how it is possible that an expensive bike computer just isn’t working as it should. Also the crash detection is a total joke. Every time is stop the alarm goes off… Totally ridiculous. And another frustration is that when I ride a gravel route it seems to take short cuts around dirt roads that are in the original gpx files… I just don’t get that…
Just ordered a wahoo elemnt roam… Hope this solves a lot of problems/frustrations…
I bought a garmin edge 530 a year ago. Just like you say the garmin/phone connectivity is a real frustration. Just can’t get it to work properly. This means that the live tracking is just a big joke. Another huge frustration especially for my wife wich make it one for me to. I find myself explaining how it is possible that an expensive bike computer just isn’t working as it should. Also the crash detection is a total joke. Every time is stop the alarm goes off… Totally ridiculous. And another frustration is that when I ride a gravel route it seems to take short cuts around dirt roads that are in the original gpx files… I just don’t get that…
Just ordered a wahoo elemnt roam… Hope this solves a lot of problems/frustrations…
Is there any word on why Garmin discontinued the 910XT, or of a return of the 910XT or a similar form factor high-end fitness watch? Everything I see at Garmin.com now attempts to present rows of data in the circular face of a watch that appears to be styled for everyday wear. In some illustrations the information on the face of the watch is truncated by the bezel.
I am open to recommendations if someone has had a positive experience with a competitor’s product similar to the 910XT.
The 910XT continued on with the 920XT in the same general form factor. That said, that’s now three generations back (replaced by the FR935, and then the FR945).
Ultimately, there’s no other square-options on the market from the last couple years. Largely because overwhelmingly people have stated they prefer a round sports watch, primarily because back in the 910XT days, that watch was just used for workouts. But these days, it’s a 24×7 watch, and people don’t really want a big square bulky thing on their wrists.
There were always be some that do want that, but from a market standpoint, there just isn’t enough volume to make the idea of a large square sports-only watch work.
And no, I don’t consider the squarish Apple Watch a truely square watch in the same sense as the giant rectangle of the FR910XT or 920XT. Totally different sizes/looks.
Came here via link to reddit.com and 15 months later this article is more relevant than ever, seeing Garmin Connect has been down for >10hrs.
It appears Ray has too many devices connected to Garmin Connect and broke the Internet. :)
Hopefully he will fix it soon.
The Garmin Fitness FB account posted the following ~an hour ago:
“We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin Connect, and as a result, the Garmin Connect website and mobile app are down at this time. This outage also affects our call centers, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologize for this inconvenience.”
How much control they have in the repair effort is unclear–a software change of their own shouldn’t offline both GC and their entire call center.
The reddit thread mentioned earlier included their GC status link repeated below:
link to connect.garmin.com
I bet the outage doesn’t really affect their call centres – I bet they’ve turned their call centres off so as not to speak to anyone
link to zdnet.com
Here 23 July 2020 for the Garmin global meltdown. Sigh
This article resonates strongly with my experience using Garmin products. Frequent issues/bugs I have encountered using their devices lead me to believe there are systemic or structural issues within the company that lead to problematic software development and release.
The wide spread crash today of connect services deepens this belief.
I think the server down issues are the result of malware.
This happened to a lot of companies worldwide.
So this time not a reason to blame Garmin.
Lets hope the damage is not to big and that the have good backups.
It is not because it happens to many companies that these companies are not to blame. What i just see is that not only their software is crappy but also their internet tools. I got a single propeller engine plane license: i will never fly (anymore) on a plane that has any critical equipment designed by Garmin. I see now that every year new fancy garmin tools for private planes are proposed for sell that make you feel the ones you bought the year before are outdated . Some Accidents will occur soon or later because of garmin engineers. Yes i already blame them
My fenix 5x had a weird bug today after garmin restored their system. When I biked no distance was recorded even though speed cadence and radar worked. I stopped restarted and still no distance even though the map showed my location. It also cant save the activity files when done. Anyone else ever see this? I’ve never had a file crash or issue in over 3 years
Garmin server is down, fine, they don’t know how to work with redundancy, quality assurance, or how to roll back updates
Now, the fact that my watch is not connecting to the App on my phone, because a server thousands of kilometers away is down, that’s a bigger issue
Means that one day, without me updating anything, Garmin will make my devices obsolete, just by switching a flag on their servers
We, as users, should reconsider paying full price for a device that has it obsolescence dictated by a simple flag in the software
Maybe we should start paying half price upfront, and then the other half during the next 10 years, as far as the product can still be used
Just my thoughts
All the time peeps buy Garmin I don’t think they have the desire to solve the problems while they have a massive revenue stream.
I have a 1 month old quatix 6 with many bugs currently have an open ticket with Garmin £629 and the wife’s £130 Fitbit is more stable
Garmin Connect does not work anymore since days, reports say they are hacked. What about some real information from the company to customer- via the media?
What about security of my data?
Garmin says its poducts are better then the other products on the maket. I sa that that is a bunch BS. I got a Garmin vivoactive 3 for xmas and it a piece of C just like their naigation system. First the watch. I have had it for a little over 8 months and have nothing but problems. First the watch shifts from the watch to a different screen ten it bgs me to do something I know not what as the first tiime was in the middle of the night, 3 tmes an hour, which wore down the attery, and it stopped working, lhank goodness. Later yesteray, I had just charged it overnight an by 5:00 it said it had a low battery. so much for their battery charge. I’ve ordered a new wartch and it not a Garmin. It is like their navigation system that directs you into a swamp. And thinks Hwy 1 is faster than 101 and insists that that is the way I must go. And it’s not the only times it did this.
So I will never buy another product from them and you shouldn’t eirther.
Barry Gerdts
kcbarry@lycos.com
add all these bugs to a bad service that try to blame any problem with the device on the customer and you remain amazed that they still hold such a market share. The GPS on my Forerunner 235 stopped working after the hack to Garmin computers and they just disclaimed it.
I don’t deny your experience with these issues.
And We all just lived through Garmin’s ransomware attack.
However, as a former Suunto Ambit Peak user, I promise you that Garmin presents a vastly better end user experience.
For a start, Suunto often gives radically wrong heart rates. Secondly, Suunto takes an eternity to lock onto GPS. Thirdly, their software is glitchy, and the connection to the smartphone is far harder to re-establish than on a Garmin.
Suunto did a relaunch of their app that was just excruciating.
Lastly, Suunto is now owned by Chinese corp and PE combo, so don’t expect them to have the same passion going forward.
Don’t know wahoo.
Polar seems to be gaining in Europe.
I bought an Edge 520 Plus a couple of weeks back. Set it up and it was updated to 5.60 firmware. Plotted one course, and followed it exactly, and right from the start it said “Off course” and remained that way the entire ride. I’ve since heard from several others who installed this update that they experience the same thing, so they basically broke navigation. It seems like they used to release beta firmware but stopped at 5.43, so I guess now they don’t even use users as early test subjects but just inflict broken software on everyone.
Prior to this I tried a Wahoo Elemnt Bolt which was a bad experience too – it worked reasonably for the first half of a trail but at a point with no possible turn it popped up “Turn left in 12ft” and after that it just seemed lost.
Right now I am trying a Lezyne Mega C. It’s fugly and definitely could do with some better UX design, but if you turn off the auto-rerouting actually seems to do pretty well (AFAICT the auto-rerouting wants to reroute to the end point, which if you’re on the outward bound part of a loop ride is just going to result in it telling you to “turn around”).
It’s amazing that it is 2020 and these devices are still so poor. It’s tempting to get a cheap Android phone, tether it to my iPhone wifi hotspot, and just use Google Maps.
I tried reverting to firmware 5.40, but with that the Garmin Connect app on iPhone crashes every time (5/5) I try to pair with the device. Pathetic. I’m going to stick with the Lezyne.
This Android line-up looks promising as an all-in-one solution — link to unihertz.com
By that I mean a single device that provides GPS navigation, training functions, and phone service.
Downside is no ANT+ but all my sensors work fine on BLE with the apps I use for cycling.
This comment really hits home for me, so even though it’s a year old, I so agree!
My fenix 5s+ has been off by 20% for the hr for much of the two years I’ve owned it, so I was using the strap- but, it rubs me raw. So I finally complained to them after 6 months, they recommended a factor re-set. It worked for a few days then started drifting again. It’s now horribly off and I’m in a place to need to decide to smash it with a hammer and buy a new one, go back to them and demand it be fixed, or find a new brand. Very frustrating.
I wanted to provide an update.
I did break down and buy the Fenix 6s +, as none of the other brands on the market really fit my needs. It turns out the previous watch was definitely broken from day 1 – in addition to what was described above, it would ‘drift’ and hang out in incorrect HR numbers and would not sync up with the cadence monitor nor my HR strap. I have had no issues with the new watch. When I compare the body battery to my Whoop it’s pretty consistent.
I think my advise to anyone is if the HR is truly 20% off like described above, that is not the MAPE – something is definitely wrong with the device.
Hey Ray, is there any update on this? I know you have a better line to Garmin’s product team than the rest of us do. As a software developer and Product Manager, I’m shocked at how bad their software is. I can’t say that I’ve seen much improvement in the past couple years either.
I get that they consistently have good hardware. But they really don’t have their software development processes really nailed. You’ve nailed a lot of the challenges, and even some of the solutions. But I figured I’d add a few extras here and get your and the community’s thoughts on them.
First, based on how the mobile app and the watches interact, Garmin doesn’t seem to have a consistent way of building features, or making sure they follow the same patterns. Take settings: Why are some of the settings only available on the watch, and some only available on the mobile app, and others still only available when you connect via desktop? Isn’t there a single API that all the apps should be able to leverage? And sure, you might have a feature on the mobile app lag the one on the desktop/web app by a couple months, but not 5 years.
Or take an example like VO2 Max, which is obviously calculated on the watch. Why aren’t those calcs also replicated on the cloud? When I get a new device, it has to re-learn my VO2 Max? (and my goal for steps, and…) but it doesn’t have to re-learn my gender or age, since that gets synced down from the cloud. How did the PM let that slip by over and over again?
I also suspect that Garmin kinda knows how to do QC on their aviation devices… but maybe they lean on the FAA for certifications to reject bugs? I’d be happy to get on a few calls with them to help them get to root cause and ask the 5 whys.
In other news, my daughter and I have been debating whether we should just write a new OS for the Garmin watches or a new mobile app, or both. If anyone would be interested in joining an Open-source project to do that, reply here.
Short version is that we are seeing changes, especially for people that have newer devices – for example the Edge x30 series (530/830/1030/1030 Plus), where there’s more lean on mobile for setup/sync/etc… And also for the Forerunner x45 series (45/245/945), as well as the Fenix 6/MARQ.
There is also undoubtedly a lot going on behind the scenes that’s harder to quantify. We’re also seeing more (all?) divisions of Garmin doing public beta of firmware to flush out bugs to a broader audience. And that does appear to be making major strides in end-state quality.
I suspect the Firstbeat acquisition will over time solve most of the VO2Max bits, and we’re already seeing them do some things in that realm.
Still, there’s lots of work to do. There’s something coming a bit later this week that’ll demonstrate some of the under the covers work they’ve been doing. Not to bugs per se directly, but to them definitely investing in the platform in ways that make things more cohesive.
Ultimately, when I talk to them it’s the challenge of boiling the ocean. Meaning, how do you ‘fix’ what is probably a hundred models and workflows out there to make everyone happy, versus sticking a stake in the ground and saying ‘Look, we can’t realistically/viably go back and do complete mobile sync setup for a FR935 or an Edge 820, but what if we start with the Edge 1030 Plus, then roll it to the 530 and 830 – and have it backwards compatible with people coming from the Edge 820?’
Which, is what they’ve done. Slowly, but surely. And of course, definitely not perfectly.
(Also, I’m putting the whole ransomware thing in a different bucket, for the mere reason that while it’s easy to poke fun at Garmin on, the reality is that with determined enough hackers, they’ll get to any organization. I worked long enough in IT security to know that. No organization is perfect. To what extent Garmin had holes versus not it’s something we really know at this point.)
Ok- this is a good clue. I will break down…! Love your blog. J
I‘ve just upgraded to the fenix 6x pro from the Forerunner 920XT. While the Forerunner surely lacked many of the features the fenix 6 series has, it worked flawlessly most of the time. Now, with the new fenix, sync has become a one-way street; it works from the watch to the Garmin Connect app on my iPhone, but nothing gets transferred from the app to the watch via Bluetooth, no trainings, no routes, nothing, even though they’re shown in the app and sent to the watch manually. It works via Wifi which is fine when I am at home but otherwise unacceptable. In addition to that, when unplugging the watch from the computer via USB, the charging screen freezes and the watch becomes inoperable until I restart it (which takes about 5 minutes). In which of the categories do these bugs fall into?
Sad isn’t it, that you are longing for the stability of you old watch. I have exactly the same, but luckily my Forerunner 920 XT is working again (after a software issue, that was fixed within a couple of weeks)
My Fenix 6 Pro is my second Garmin watch. With my Forerunner 935, I didn’t spent too much attention to the bugs I noted. Bug with my Fenix, I really begon to observe the bugs – mostly aesthetic/cosmetical but annoying though for a premium watch – and decided to report them to Garmin Belgium. Results:
– 85% of the SIMPLE bugs I reported (with video’s, screenshots, …) aren’t resolved, even almost 1 year later. Some of these bugs were alreday present on the Forerunner 935…
– 85% of the calls I introduced didn’t get an answer (I’m still waiting for reactions for calls that I introduced in December 2019)
Now, I use the watch for what it is – a superb watch but far too expensive regarding the support of Garmin – and I don’t wait for reactions of Garmin anymore.
BUT I CERTAINLY WON’T BUY A GARMIN PRODUCT ANYMORE! Garmin thinks too much about how making a lot of money and too less about how to make his expensive products really better. It’s a shame and it must change. The only way to achieve this, for use users/clients – is probably to boycott the Garmin products…
on the Fenix 6 series, the initial firmware 3.10 had excellent HR values for my running and swimming. Since they updated that in September of last year, HR values outside of an activity are just random numbers, TERRIBLE. HR values while running and swimming have been off since updating from that initial firmware.
They have NEVER fixed the HR issues, especially OUTSIDE of an activity. How the hell are you supposed to be able to judge your over all health if you can’t get reliable HR numbers while going about your normal day?
I’ve been extremely happy with my AW4’s. I have 2. I keep one on for “dress” and have one for “Working out”. Both have different stuff loaded on them. The data from the AW’s has been reliable. Too bad they are square and have only 1.5 days battery life.
UNTIL Garmin updates their HR sensor, or fixes this mediocre POS, i’ll not buy another Garmin.
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Hi I purchased a Fenix 5 plus in mid July (refurbished with one year warranty) the unit looked brand new and everything was fine until I updated the software lost GPS functionality. Then Garmin express could not restore it. I returned the unit to Garmin for an exchange. After I got the unit GPS was updated and worked really well, but the barometer/thermometer was not working or disabled. I did another exchange with Garmin for another refurbished unit received it today 9/10/2020 updated the watch again the barometer and temperature sensor is either not working or disabled. This is a big waste of my time why can’t Garmin update the watch themselves test it then send it to the customer WTF is going on with Garmin.
Couldn’t agree more. I’m officially moving on. My next computer and watch will be either a Wahoo or the new Hammerhead Karoo 2….watch I’ll reboot my Suunto or see what else is out there. I can’t get anything to connect anymore via bluetooth or manual on the computer. I’ve reset devices, re-downloaded apps, everything…consider myself tech savvy but just stumped how something can work and then not. The not working is now more times than working so time to move on. Oh, now I remember why I stayed…Varia radar. I can get that on many devices now so no need to stay…..
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Unfortunately Garmin appear to use Programmers for software development rather than Software /Engineers.
Programmers use device emulators running on a PC to test their software – so don’t understand the way the device hardware works. These are real time multi tasking complex hardware dependent devices.
Software Engineers do understand how the device hardware works and would need to test their software after emulation testing on the actual device.
Now you can see why simple bugs that are obvious when the device is switched on aren’t resolved pre-release.
It’s a mess….that Garmin need to sort out and soon.
The article exposes the issues and suggests a way forward.
Let’s hope Garmin introduce much needed changes….just don’t hold tour breath!
Garmin devices – great, when they work
Wahoo devices – they just work
In the battle to avoid frustration in life, it’s a simple choice. Wahoo every time
Unless you want actual maps. With identifying street names on the map and POI’s and stuff. Then there is no choice, since Wahoo doesn’t provide one.
If you’re after maps with street names then I can recommend an app called Google Maps
Or I could use my Garmin Edge 830 which has…maps with street names! And POI’s! And unlike a phone running Google Maps, the 830 can record the ride and all of the ANT+ sensors I use and send it automatically to several places at the end of the ride. It has ClimbPro, which I really like. It has onboard maps and can navigate using those maps, including a limited capability to deal with route changes (not as good as I’d like, but one can usually manage). All without having to mess with a phone and a head unit with line art maps.
You could use that. Up until it drops sensors, freezes, crashes, or reboots itself. Good luck Garmin fanboy. You’ll need it.
Over and out
Hilarious. I’ve had the 830 since it came out, so almost a year and half of use, closing in on 500 rides. I’ve lost exactly 2 miles (out of 20 that day) of data, and only because I didn’t feel the need to do anything about the freeze since I was so close to home. (The only other time it froze, I noticed and since I was on my way out, I restarted. Both problems occurred just after I got it.) I’ve lost a sensor (a single one, of the three I usually pair) once, but I was running a beta then. I have the usual brief sensor dropouts on the trainer. I’ve navigated with it many times, the only problems being the usual weird Garmin problems, occasionally giving directions where none are necessary, occasionally not giving directions where you’d think it would. But you can always just follow the course line on the maps with street names and POI’s so you know where you are. There’s currently a weird problem with recently made Strava Routes (altitude predictions are way too high, and the profile is very noisy which confuses ClimbPro), but that may well be Strava’s problem. Older routes work fine.
Of course, I know ELEMNT’s are perfect, so enjoy your perfect, mapless device.
This is all about Garmin. I’ve been watching the Fenix forums for a year now and just maybe this latest beta shows hopes of getting the HR values more in line, especially outside of an activity. The Garmin watches have been Random Number generators for the past year and that HR sensor. Mainly outside of an activity.
Glad your experience has been good but I’d say the 530 is not equal to the price tag.
Last night I went for a ride. Hit record, 530 shows recording. Get to the start of the course 530 says, off route – make u turn. After 450m the 530 finally updated from, make u turn to showing the next proper turn. Later in the course, the same off route message shows up despite being on the route. Get home, upload and a chunk of the beginning of the ride was missing.
This article is so, so spot on!
Thank you very much for this “on-the-spot” article about Garmin issues. As a user of Garmin watches for a lot of years (20?), I have felt the lack of quality in hard- and software several times. I had a watch exchanged within a year, the Forerunner 100, I guess. This year I bought a Fenix 6S which is probably going back for repair/exchange now due to a hardware issue. The sad thing about this is, that I bought it to replace my Forerunner 920 XT that was draining battery so fast that I thougt it had come to it’s end. Meanwhile I can use my Forerunner 920 XT again while my Fenix 6S is out for repair since the battery draining turned out to be due to a software issue that was fixed within an week or two. I guess, another brand sportwacht will be a more reliable substitute or as a second watch, in case of future Garmin issues
The future of cycling sensor data analysis: a Linux phone with EEGLAB and BCIBLAB. Watch your brainwaves when your are cycling. EEGLAB developer Arnaud Delorme from the Swartz Center of Neuroscience is optimistic about that EEGLAB and probably also BCILAB is running on the Xioami Poco F1 with Ubuntu Touch:
link to forums.ubports.com
The future of cycling sensor data analysis: a Linux phone with EEGLAB and BCIBLAB. Watch your brainwaves when your are cycling. EEGLAB developer Arnaud Delorme from the Swartz Center of Neuroscience is optimistic about that EEGLAB and probably also BCILAB is running on the Xioami Poco F1with Ubuntu Touch. Find more information in the Ubuntu Touch forum.
Hi DC,
Thank you for all your reviews and product information. Please consider putting the first few paragraphs of this article “Garmin’s Biggest Competitor Is Their Own Software Instability” at the beginning of all your Garmin Edge reviews. Between my wife and I we have 4 units. Two are down hard: Garmin 800s SD Card Reader failed and on the other the dreaded “System Software Missing.” On a Garmin 830 the touch screen freezes requiring a stop and restart. And finally one 800 works, except when it doesn’t.
I am finished with Garmin.
Bob
Thanks for this article, very therapeutic. I can relate to most of the frustrations referred to, and 2 years on still a lack of stability on some of the specific issues eg Edge 830. The newer auto hydration target update on Garmin Connect app drives me insane, it seems that on some days hydration target updates based on activity , other days not.
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This is still so relevant as after starting with Garmin on the 920 and Fenix 3 and 3HR I just went for the 6X PRO for my 65th Birthday
1.Again the instructions just remotely match software 15.20 and have many dead ends even when using the web portal
2. I think it would be extremely difficult for any First time Garmin user to use the product as you have to setup on Connect Mobil or Garmin Express to finish turning on the watch and spend 4 hours updating
3. Kind of happy I wanted to 15.20 to buy as the only bad bug I have seen so far is auto climb even when off switch screen black and white and screen changing
Even when OFF had to go in and turn it MORE OFF as the first toggle did not stop the color invert and had to turn that off 👎
4. Garmin’s solution seems to still be hard reset your watch and trash all the settings you can’t backup or restore
I still love the watch BUT it’s pretty easy to see why Apple is selling well
“…my bet is the vast majority of time a person chooses a non-Garmin product over a Garmin one is not because Garmin lost the features or price battle. It’s because that person has been bit one too many times by buggy Garmin products.”
That’s definitely what drove me to their competitors products. Not just being bitten by bugs, I all software is going to have some bugs. What really pushed me away was their multiple responses to multiple issues of “that issue has been resolved in the next generation product”. Yeah, I’m not going to buy a new generation of hardware when my current one was less than 2 years old.
I’m surprised by this response. In every case that has happened to me, Garmin has replaced (or offered to replace) my bug-affected product with the next generation which has the bug fixed. They replaced my 910XT with a 920XT. They replaced my 920XT with a Fenix 3. They offered to replace my vivosmart 4 with (something). But that was actually a different form factor and wouldn’t meet my needs. (Now granted in each of my cases, I reported the bug in less than a year after purchase. So they could have chalked each of these up to warranty.)
Is anyone aware of problems with the pace calculation when using training mode (e. g. 1minnintervals) on the Fenix 5+? For me, the pace keeps jumping significantly even when running at constant pace. This is especially apparent at the end/beginning of an interval. When running 3:30 it might start with 4min or 3min before trending in the right direction
Interesting that this post continues to be relevant. For me, Garmins are just hit or miss. Two 305’s were great. Fenix 1 was a total sh**show. Fenix 3hr has been great and still going (with a new battery) after five years. Tried an Edge 130 and it crashed mid-ride almost every ride. Sent it back. Got an Edge 520 plus which mostly worked except live tracking and group tracking. Group tracking never worked. Recently got an Edge 1030 and having issues with bluetooth connecting to phone. I had to reset or re-install numerous times yesterday to get it to upload a workout. Recently tried a Venu. Some things on the Venu were good but auto-pause on runs never worked no matter the settings and heart rate was terrible. Vivosmart 4 that I have is mostly good but pulse ox is worthless and not meaningful in any way. Vivosport is mostly good but gps tracks and heart rate are not top notch.
All in all, I get a successful product from Garmin about 50% of the time. When it’s good it’s really good, when it’s bad it’s really bad. Unfortunately, my attempts at competitors products haven’t been much better. Tom Tom nailed it with gps accuracy and heart rate with their first watch with music but a subsequent update killed the whole damn thing where it wouldn’t pair at all with any headphones. I’m still using my five year old Fenix 3HR mostly because I’m afraid to upgrade. I don’t need much of the new features and afraid I’ll get a lemon. What’s worse is Garmin has 25 watches that all mostly do the same thing it’s hard to determine what to take a chance on. Garmin please Keep it Simple Stupid!
I changed to Garmin competitor’s product due to pricey and buggy issue.
Used to have FR235. After few months of using, it started to lose tracking due to software crash. I had a race few years ago. I remember I did start the watch to have HR and GPS lock before the race and pressed the start button when the race started. But eventually it recorded NOTHING… Luckily that is not a virtual race and the record was counted by the organizer’s equipment…
But my wife (Venu user) got another terrible experience about the software instability issue. She and I participated into a virtual trail race recently, the organizer requests to submit the race result by submitting gpx file. During the trail, she found that the auto-pause function screwed up the record. The watch would pause the record during in motion randomly without notification. Even manually resumed the the record by pressing the button, the watch would pause the record immediately by the time of releasing the button (she was keeping on moving when she pressed the button). Later she found that the watch did track and display her pacing and heart rate, but the distance and duration were frozen. After synced the record to the phone app to check the record, we found a lot of sections of record were lost. She can’t submit this freaking record to the race, and we are thinking do we need to go for it one more time…
I am thinking should I buy another brand watch for my wife. I am using Suunto and Polar happily without any instability or buggy issue. However, my wife wants to have a watch that is able to play music, and it seems only Garmin watch can do it… Arrrrrr….
Never owned a gps watch, so before splashing out big bucks in Fenix 6, I purchased a cheap forerunner 45 to see if garmin stuff is any good and how reliable and useful the watch is to me. I am thoroughly disappointed in the software reliability, battery life and ease of use. As a computer programmer myself I can tell garmin top dogs know nothing about software or the software development process or usability. These garmin criminals will not be getting any more of my dollars and I’ll get a useful cheap device of alibaba instead.
2 years later and the situation is same or even worse. With a huge cybersecurity fail in Aug2020…
Honestly, I think it’d be pretty hard to argue the situation is worse than two years ago.
Most products have since launched beta programs that allow people to test and contribute fixes and edge cases before launch. Garmin even most recently delayed their entire advanced sleep metrics rollout nearly a year due to feedback in beta.
As for the ransomware attack last summer, I’ve been around the cybersecurity block long enough to know that virtually every company can be hit there. Any company that thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. One aims to do a much as possible to mitigate those things, but it’s virtually impossible in large enterprise networks to reduce that chance to zero. We’re only going to see a rise in those types of attacks, because it works and is easy money for these groups.
Which doesn’t mean everything Garmin does is perfect, hardly. One can be upset about Garmin for all sorts of other things. But I’d struggle to find many people who have been around the Garmin realm 2-4 years+ that actually would say it’s somehow worse now (software stability wise- the point of this post), than 2 years ago.
Better. But not really good in every respects. It took 3 years until OWS worked with the Fenix 5. And now it is a similar game with the F6X again. A great watch and I really like it. However OWS with my F6X is really bad. That of my friend works well. Garmin is very supportive. But I do not want to change my watches all the time. Even when Garmin replaces them.
Hi Franz,
To me this sounds very strange. I own FR935, F5S, F5X+ and F6X. I’m not the most frequent OWS person but I try to swim as often as possible in the summer and I’ve never had problems with any of those models. IMO it’s about technique of swimming. One has to be very careful not to have the watch hand below water for any long period of time. For the record I always swim with two watches, Garmin on one wrist and either a Suunto or Polar on the other and they usually agree :)
I have a Garmin history with 910XT, F5 Sapphire and the F6X saphire.
– 910 XT accceptable swim tracks from the begining
– F5 sapphire: it took Garmin 3 years to deliver a GPS firmware update worked good
– And nowthe F6X sapphire delivering really bad tracks. Only mine. Not that of my friends
I have appended a plot of the real positions of the F6X (latitude and longitude)
With this swim track I have put out my hand out of water for 20 seconds after every 200 meters.
The watch does not seem to get satellites back in that time. And the points “recorded” by watch are a number of fake points using compass and estimated velocity. This results in a pace that is totatlly constant in an hour of swimming.
And Garmin tells me that GPS is working. A Real joke
And compare it to the F5. Less points. But correct real points.
Freestyle in both cases. In the F6 case a pause every 100m – 200m and holding the watch into the air to regain satellitess.
If you’re having to hold the watch in the air every 100-200m otherwise it loses satellites, then something is physically wrong with your watch (or, you live in NYC/Manhatten, in which case…shrug). I’d push back strongly on Garmin support there.
The watch was hold out of the water for test purposes.
If I do not do it I have strange effects. When pausing I had the effect that till that point the distance looked OK. And the watch did a 700m increment without moving.
To summarize:
– In the beginning there is a GPS sync and the first 100-200m seem to be OK.
– The F6 tries to calculate new “GPS-Positions” by using the compass and the strokes
(not bad in principle, however it would be helpful to have some real GPS positions from time to time
That algorithm can be seen when taking longitude and latitude points from the FIT-File because
there are real straight lines. I do not swim so exact
– After some time the F6 looses GPS connectivity and the loss speed is quicker after resyncs
– Compared to the F5 the F6 seems to deliver much less real points
It is difficult to track the GPS quality. The GPS2FIT datafield does not work on the F6 anymore.
But that synthetic field is a joke. When the F5 was really bad with the old firmware and GPS2FIT the quality was always 4. And the track jumped like a piece of lithium on water.
What makes analysis difficult is that the number of satellites visisble is no longer available like in the good old 910XT times. So it is not possible to wait until a number of satellites is used for tracking. The green bow gives no information for swimming. Because during freestyle swimming the number of catched satellites increases seldom.
I will try next go visually check the GPS datafield during swimming next. I would not wonder if I have good quality during the swim and no GPS data recorded. I will continue the track.
But to comment on the initial post. The quality of the software of the rest of the F6X I use is really good. It has increased over the last two years.
Oh, sorry, somehow along this chain I missed we were still talking about swimming.
It might be worth trying to switch from the default GPS+GLONASS to GPS+GALILEO.
That said, GPS will be lost (for every device on the market) when the watch goes underwater. The main goal of “openwater swim mode” is applying the algorithm to all that messy data to figure out where you were going.
It is like expected. During Swimming all time 5 bars are shown for the satellites. However recording of GPS coordinates stops after 10 seconds(!) of freestyle swimming. This seems to be a joke data field. Just have a look at the screen shot of the excel. Only when pausing a longer time GPS recovers. My old Fenix 5 and my daugthers 945 are much better. And also the F6X of a friend shows much better tracks. I do not expect the impossible, i.e. GPS-Tracking under water. However new watches should not be much worse than old ones. At the beginning the first 200m I tried to hold my hand wide out of the water at every free style stroke. I will try out my old F5 and my daugthers 945 to exclude that my free style stroke is so bad. And if it is better Garmin has no more excuse.
Currently they tell me the normal bla bla about swimming. Keep your 600€ watch under your bathing cap and so on.
With beta FW16.70 (or without gloves, the watch was always outside the gloves) I get good tracks now. Now I have the problem that in a 2800m swim 300ms are missing. Repeated this two timws.
Hi Ray
The problem has been either solved by 16.70 beta. Or by not wearing gloves any more. The watch was always over the gloves of course. So theory is either improved something in beta or removal of the gloves. Did both at the same time. No I have a new problem. I swim a litte bit more than 2700m and get just a little bit over 2000m. Measureing with google, or do correction of distance on strace give the 2700m. And tracks from friends with e.g. Polar or Suunto, too. When looking into the fit file there is not a GPS coordinate every second. Cannot be expected in water. However there are enought points to reconstruct the route. This is quite good. I have appended it. When there are no GPS coordinates Garmin has implemented some “magic” which increases distance. However I expect it is not corrected when there are valid coordinates again or at the end of swimming. I know it is not easy to do it correctly (GPS points are not exact, limited memory in device to do linear backward correction for distance and speed and so on). However but that is the job of a professional company developing such devices. I have reported it to Garmin and get the standard blabla with put your watch under your bathing cap and so on. I will send my analysis with the wish to forward it to development. So software quality has improved but has still much room to improve. And customer communication is really bad. Why not admitting algorithm is not perfect and will be improved in later versions. The 6X is really a device I like.
Extract from fit-file. Probably root of the problem. There are often missing points.
But for a good algorithm missing points in that extend should not be a problem.
Hi Franz,
I wonder how you swim. I swam this week using Fenix 6X Pro Solar on left arm and Suunto 9 Baro on right arm. Difference in distance 35m and I swam 1km. See picture. There is no problem with software I would say, nor hardware, just technique. I am super careful with holding arms above water every stroke (freestyle)
Normal free style. With F5 all is OK and distance is correct.
And the track I have plotted looks really good.
And is correct. If you calculate the distance form the points everything is OK.
I have appended the track from Garmin connect. Garmin says 2063m and the real distance when measuring with Google or if you use correction from Strave is a little bit over 2700m. And that is a real big deviation. The recorded GPS coordinates are good. Only sometimes GPS is lost.
So they have to work on correction if GPS is temporarily lost.
Garmin seems to have an algorithm for measuring speed and distance which takes severyl sources into account:
– GPS (it cannot be expected that GPS is valid every second when swimming, so estimation is necessary. What will beu used addionally
– Strokes dervied from average stroke lenght before?
– Compass?
– Accelerometer?
– ???
I think they have some Kalman-Filtering to get best results. That matches surely for a lot of people, but for me parameterisation does not fit.For what reason ever.
I did not make exact analysis, but I think that the loss in distance correlates to loss of GPS signal.
And probably it is to difficult for them to do a backward correction of distance when GPS is valid again (e.g. linear interpolation of distance and speed for points with missing GPS coordinates)
I have forwarded it to Garmin und they promised to give it to development. But it may take a longer time. Its OK.
Very disappointed with Fenix5x
Terrible software management and updates, minimal update options, a glorified fitbit as it turns out!
A special thanks to you share this type of post. Please keep it up.
You are absolutely correct. Almost every time Garmin updates something, I have to go in and readjust my settings. That gets old very quickly. I just want a device to work properly, as I have set it up to be, and then left alone. I have truly considered giving up on Garmin and going to another product.
Over 2 years since this article was written and it’s still of current relevance. It’s so sad to imagine that the executives either didn’t read this or chose to disregard.
Garmin still can’t track position in water, changes sleep times (will record an awake time 30 minutes after alarm and I get up and walk around), and has the worst time knowing what the current outside temperature is among many other things.
I look forward to the Fenix 7 but will be very skeptical to spent $950 on something that will let me down.
Thank You for being an honest critic of all that you review. I trust you to tell the truth and not be a spokesperson for the corporate world. You’re the only review I trust.
Swimming in open water is still trash on the F6.
After 3 years they managed it to get it running on the F5.
So there is still some hope.
However it seems to be the Sony chipset combined with bad algorithms that delivers joke results.
The only answer you get from Garmin put the watch under your bathing cab.
As the F5 delivers good results now the F6 is crab concerning swimming.
I bought the F6X as DCR said the best swim track recorded ever.
But he seems to have a selected watch for test.
The rest really works well.
I went from Garmin to Bryton. I vowed never to use Garmin any more due to the flaky software and the failure of my Vivo Fit after a year or so.
I am now on my 3rd Fenix 5 in 4 weeks after send the other 2 back for software issues. All 3 have connection issues where the iPhone sat next to the watch or in my pocket has frequent and inconvenient “no connection”. This issue of course means that I can’t upload activities reliably without using a computer running Garmin Express. However, that then resets my Widgets to the default order – old reported unfixed bug. Luckily that means that I won’t be able to see the Stairs widget and see how many stairs I have apparently climbed. It seems odd that when I tend to climb the stairs about 12 times every day (which I count), that I usually see 2 Garmin stairs climbed and about 37 Garmin stairs descended – Garmin seem to think I am burrowing down through the earth every day.
Try out to cancel the Garmin App on the iPhone and restart it. That helps in most cases for my F6X
Hi DC,
I use my F6 for navigation, which is one of the features I love with my Garmin, as I often go on quite long runs in areas I don’t know. However I have noticed that courses that are correct in the mobile app, get inaccurate in the watch navigation interface. Sections get straightened out, occasionally sending you through a swamp, a mountain wall or someone’s back yard. It’s only occurring on longer courses, say 30k and up. Would you know if this is a known issue that you heard about before? Trying to google it but not having much luck. If I can’t rely on nav, I will need another watch. Thank you
Ps problem occurs even if it’s below 50 course points.
Well, not much has changed. Garmin updated firmware on the GPSMap 66i from 8.50 to 8.80 and killed the expedition mode which provided about 100 hour life while tracking location every ten minutes and handling InReach messages at that time. Now when it goes into expedition mode it won’t track, won’t wake up properly, and has to be rebooted to find satellites again. Well over a week and no solution, although they appear to have pulled down the update at least temporarily.
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Well said, your every point is true. You did a great job. Thanks for sharing
I’ve had an Edge 530 for just over a year. It has performed very well for me with no recurring problems. I don’t use any third party apps or add ons, except for a Polar HRM (no power meters, etc)., and I don’t use Strava. I record ride data with it, and occasionally use the navigation for the quickest route back to start (for which it works ok, not great, but it seems to get me there). My phone is a fairly new Android phone, and I know I’ve had bluetooth issues with other phones and other devices, so I wonder if some of the issues people experience are related to bluetooth (although I realize that many of them aren’t).
Before anyone thinks I work for Garmin, or have some other reason to push their products, here are my negative Garmin experiences: I had a Forerunner 410. It was terrible. I think I got it to work maybe 5 times. I remember standing over my bike in front of my garage for up to 20 minutes trying to get it to start. It was perhaps the worst piece of technology I’ve ever dealt with. I have a Forerunner 735XT. I quite liked it, and don’t remember any significant issues with it. I lost it, and reported it lost to Garmin. I hoped that if someone connected it to Garmin’s website Garmin could let that person know that it had been lost. Garmin let me know that there was no way they would help me.
So with all the bad things being said about Garmin I still can’t resist their technology… I now read more reviews before buying their products, but I still seem to be buying them. The reviews about the 530 said that the buttons aren’t great, and they’re not, but they work, sometimes after a couple of pushes.
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I trust you post again soon…
Garmin is not moving with the times for sure. My issue: I have been able to import favorites (as a gpx file) into my two portable Garmin devices for years. Now I have a Honda Ridgeline Touring with in-dash Garmin unit I cannot. I wish garmin would do an update so I can use the Garmin menu and go Settings, (then right below menu choice for map update) Import favorites, from USB via flash drive.
Thanks for this article years after having published it.
I bought an Epix Pro gen2 two months ago and it has so many issues with software and the Garmin support in germany really doesn’t take care of it (to be honest, it really sucks, sorry for that). Bugs reported 2 years ago in the forum still persist or re-occur with the next firmware update. Someone in the forum just used an appropriate wording for it: it’s FRAUD, what garmin does!
I have a Fortrex 801 and connect to it via Linux/USB.
Garmin firmware is a mess. It is obvious that the developers are understaffed/oversollicited or worse.
In the current version (2.10, 2024-05-05) I would no longer recommend it to someone who depends on reliable firmware. I’m quite frustrated by the poor firmware (and its updates). Personally I bought it because of the 2xAAA batteries features, which is an important criterion to me.
I upload routes and waypoints via USB to the gpx/ folder. Apparently it helps to also empty the EDM folder although it is not clear why that might help. I suspect that the Activities/ folder is also a culprit.
There are no firmware announcements. The firmware update is unpredictable. Support calls it hypothetical when I ask them what would happen if the battery failed during a firmware update; anyway, I cannot tell the unit to wait with the update because I need to check the battery state first. As a result, I must try to remember to check the battery before connecting via BT.
When following too many routes, it becomes impossible to manually mark new waypoints. Also every FOLLOWED route gets *appended* into the WPTX.gpx file (that also collects manually marked waypoints). Support tells me to convert routes to tracks first. Every 801 user knows how inferior the TRACK menu is, compared to the ROUTE menu. Garmin apparently mixed up the GPX concepts of tracks and routes (see link to en.wikipedia.org)
Also, the (obviously) unnamed waypoints of routes end up in the WAYPOINTS>NEAREST menu/list. I expect that list to only show ***MY*** nearest waypoints. How obvious can that be?
A while ago I was lucky to be able to track my flight from Porto to Brussels. I landed in Brussels, apparently the elevation was 5000m. Agreed that cabin pressure can cause an issue, but after stepping out onto the tarmac, everything should be ok. Nope: apparently I had landed on the Himalaya… Apart from that, it is not clear how “autocalibrate” works on the altimeter.
Settings under HEADING do not work.
I’m constantly irritated by the “satellite lost” message, which obliges me to either wait for it to disappear or click it away but be careful not to click once it disappears, otherwise I risk performing an action that I don’t want. This message is useless and can be replaced by an icon (which is the case in the MAP view, so why do we need a message?).
I don’t care about connectivity, I don’t need permanent connectivity over BT, I dont’ need to consult my SMS or whatever on my phone. This is ridiculous: I have a phone to do that. What I want is KISS: simple, robust and reliable firmware. Simple enough that software engineers don’t need to face a huge complexity, and produce more bugs than features.
Please see also link to reddit.com
(!@#$% I forgot to enter my email, and everything was erased in this comment field, so I had to type everything in again. Can this please be reported to whoever maintains this website’s feedback feature?)