Livetrack issues unacceptable - Why isn't this high priority and deemed critical ?

I am well aware that there are several other posts about the current state of Livetrack on the Android platform, but I have intentionally created a new thread.

As a software engineer and architect of 25 years who has worked on both desktop and mobile platforms I am well qualified to comment on the current situation, and I find it unacceptable.

Lets analyse the situation as it stands, point form:

1. A system that was working perfectly for months, if not years, previously is now suddenly completely broken in multiple different ways.

LiveTrack refuses to start at all for many users, sometimes it will only start manually and not automatically, and sometimes it will start both manually and automatically, but then it refuses to stop automatically if it started automatically.

That's 3 separate and distinct issues with LiveTrack that have now appeared at the same time, out of nowhere, directly related to recent updates to the Garmin Connect app for Android.

2. A multitude of different users are all reporting the same issues, all of whom did not have these problems previously, which clearly indicates to me that the problem lies squarely with the Garmin Connect software on Android (or possibly compatibility issues between that software and the latest version/s of the Android OS), and it has nothing to do with customers hardware or customers doing something wrong.

Re-installing the Garmin Connect app does not fix the problems permanently or properly.

Deleting all application data for the Garmin Connect App does not fix the problems either.

3. Having re-installed the Garmin Connect software on my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, which has never had any problem running Connect or Livetrack before, 4 times in the last 3 days, and observing that re-installation only temporarily fixes the problem, I can safely say that re-installation is NOT a solution to the current issues, certainly not with the current version of the software.

I haven't trained for several months due to medical problems, but when I stopped training everything was working perfectly my side, with the SAME phone and the SAME Garmin Edge 520.

Now I come back a few months later, install all the pending updates, and suddenly things that were working, literally for years, simply do not work anymore and are completely broken and unusable?

I find this state of affairs to be completely unacceptable for several reasons, namely:

1. First rule of deploying software updates live is: You do not remove functionality unless you plan to replace it with something better and you NEVER introduce changes that break backward compatibility or are considered breaking changes in any way.

2. LiveTrack is a SAFETY feature that many people rely on, and is one of the best things that Garmin have done on their platform, and yet there appears to be no sense of urgency to fix this problem? Why not?

I fail to understand how these current LiveTrack issues are not deemed to be Critical Severity A issues that warrant an emergency hot fix. Where I currently work, something this damaging to the company's reputation, having this much of a negative impact on users, would immediately be escalated to our highest severity level and our developers would basically LIVE at the office until this was resolved and a hot fix was released to patch this ... WITHIN 48 HOURS maximum.

3. If Garmin know that it's their software causing this, and I think we can all agree that it's patently obvious that it is at this point, but they don't know how to fix it and are battling to pin down the root cause, then they need to ADMIT that and COMMUNICATE with their user base properly, instead of ignoring all of us and refusing to deal with the issue.

Have they never heard of public relations?

Having spent the last 3 days of my life fighting with the Garmin Connect app and LiveTrack, having LiveTrack work when it feels like it (in different ways, apparently depending on the time of day, the phase of the moon, and who knows what else), or not work at all, I am now at the end of my tether.

This is not new software and not even a new feature in existing software. This was working perfectly, for a very long time, and somebody did something to break it, and Garmin need to figure out who did what, and fix it. And they should do so as a matter of urgency, not take 6 to 8 weeks to maybe release a patch, while they refuse to communicate.

Furthermore, this is not even difficult to reproduce. I've managed to get it to break multiple times in the last 3 days, in multiple different ways, without even trying to break it. In fact, I was trying NOT TO break it.

@Garmin: What is going on? What are you doing to fix this? Why is this not being dealt with urgently as it should be? Why are you not communicating with your users properly?

You make valid points, and it could well be that new versions of the OS on Samsung devices are doing something different with battery usage, but even if that's the case Garmin need to identify the root cause of the problem and either fix it ASAP or let their users know that as it stand they cannot fix the problem.

With regards using LiveTrack without Beacon, I would, if Garmin offered the ability to send SMS's directly from the Connect app. But they don't, instead they chose to rely on Strava Beacon for that, so that they didn't have to implement it themselves. I've posted about that particular issue previously and told Garmin what I thought of that idea too, but that's a different story again.

None of the 3 people who track me check email on their phones. And only being able to send email to a modern mobile device is utterly useless.

Garmin chose to leverage Beacon for SMS functionality, so they must accept the burden of ensuring that their integration with Beacon works properly all the time. If they don't want to, they must implement SMS support themselves and break that dependency.