Does Garmin Care?

7185080 25 days ago

I scrolled through this forum section because I was looking for something and I am shocked at the amount of bug reports, suggestions, issues.

About 80% of the asks and reports are very valid, and honestly, a half-brained chicken randomly pecking at the keyboard on a Friday afternoon would be able to vibe-code these and still not be late to Sabbath dinner.

Instead what I observe is that these suggestions and bugs, are instead fixed with the next hardware release, to make you go buy the new thing, yikes.

I only own one Garmin device, GPSMAP 76CSx and I do not intend on an upgrade. Wanted to get one of those Garmin GPS watches, and it is kind of a hard sell for me, I am surprised they have not started charging subscription for the GPS reception yet, my guess is it would be illegal.

0 flowstate 24 days ago

7185080 said:
Instead what I observe is that these suggestions and bugs, are instead fixed with the next hardware release, to make you go buy the new thing, yikes.

If it makes you feel better, some of those feature requests and bugs are never resolved

0 kochmans 22 days ago in reply to flowstate

Better yet, Garmin has a solid record of breaking things that worked perfectly.

0 ashtermet 21 days ago in reply to kochmans

It looks like they broke CSV export in October. Before you could export a pool swim and it would have lap times, now it only exports the interval headers (manual button presses on the watch).

It doesn't seem like they added anything, just took a working function and made it worse.

0 flowstate 20 days ago in reply to ashtermet

imo Garmin CSV export has always been bad, anyway.

The data isn't normalized, for one thing - in many cases (such as lap/interval split times *), it's seemingly meant to be human-readable without any regard for how software such as Excel/Sheets/Numbers would handle the data. Kinda defeats the purpose of CSV export imo, since that's usually meant for additional analysis via software.

(*) you can't take the average or total of lap split times in the CSV export without manually checking the data to see if it needs to be normalized, which is also a manual step.

For example, you might see lap split times in the lap CSV export such as:

3:00
3:05.1
2:55
3:01

Seems reasonable, right? Any human being would understand those split times, assuming they were for a reasonable lap distance such as 800m.

The problem is that the second lap (bolded) is interpreted by Excel/Sheets as mm:ss.(fractional seconds), while the other laps are interpreted as hh:mm, despite all of the data actually representing lap times in minutes and seconds. So you can't do math on these times without normalizing the data by hand - e.g.

0:03:00
3:05.1
0:02:55
0:03:01

(Adding the leading "0:" to the other laps ensures that the following groups of digits are interpreted as minutes and seconds, as they should be)

Sorry to say, but Garmin software has always been bad. I could write endless blog posts about frustrating Garmin software issues that Garmin users just live with / ignore.