I've been patient for days waiting for this product to work properly. I'm beginning to think it will never perform. I'm on a weight loss journey and this is becoming hugely discouraging. I'm preparing to pack it up and return it for a refund.
It is with out a doubt the most poor performance for any software company that I have ever seen in my career. I put some thoughts together about the cultural problems I believe Garmin has and what they need to get in front of the problems and start delighting their customers again. Apologizing for disastrous performance doesn't cut it anymore.
Garmin is a hardware company. They are horrible on software. They need software engineers asap to compete with the software Giants which which most likely will eat them up like Google, Apple, Microsoft & amazon. Get with the times Garmin. Hardware is dead. Software is more important today.
The Connect site has not been having a problem for the last few days. The site has had problems for a lot longer.
*shrug* I stand by what I wrote. You're certainly welcome to disagree. Garmin definitely has had their issues and I'm no cheerleader (see my others posts), but Connect has generally worked fine up until the recent troubles. Don't let your frustration steer you into histrionics.
Do feel free to vote with your wallet and move to whichever platform you feel works better. Polar and Suunto are making advances but still lag behind. PolarFlow is a UI disaster and a stalker's paradise. Fitbit is doing well if all you're doing is activity monitoring, but they don't yet have any viable solution for more serious training. Strava is pretty good, but the best non-phone hardware to work with them (from simplicity) is Garmin.
As I said above, just my observation over the course of three and a half years using Garmin Connect. If you've only been using Connect a couple months you may certainly have a different perception.
The past few weeks are definitely not indicative of Garmin Connect over the past few years in terms of availability. That said, over 5 years later and Garmin Connect is marginally better at best. We got a new UI that's just a nice skin but very few major new features. Equipment tracking took 5 years to implement yet still no customizable activities, time in HR zones, gradient reporting, TE/HRR reporting, etc. This list seems endless. Very very few new features and most of the ones requested in this forum over this time have been completely ignored.
Also keep note. Look at STRAVA how software can disrupt competition and marketplace. STRAVA is pretty much better then Garmin in almost everyway like, social, connectivity, practicality, stability, functionality etc. It's just mind boggling that Garmin to this day still have not figured out that software will lead to the bigger market place. These hardware products like edge are slowly being eating up by software phone apps. It's like they are ignoring their biggest threat and still focusing on building the next hardware upgrade and not improving software stability & software features. I don't get it...
I was given my Vivofit for Christmas and Garmin Connect worked fine at first but now it no longer does, it stopped working totally for a while now some of the days steps are showing but it is also missing day and the same with the sleep. I am getting really frustrated and my daughter who bought it for me isn't happy either. Some days it didn't sync and other days it takes 2 or 3 goes before it works also I found I had to take the ANT stick from out of the back of my computer and put it into the front USB port then hold my hand down right next to it. Garmin Connect isn't working on my phone or my iPad either. Also is there somewhere I can find information on the graphs particularly the sleep graph, I have lots of blue pointing up and down but I don't understand what it all means ? At least the site has this message " We are experiencing issues with Garmin Connect. Our team is actively investigating the issue. Please visit our status page for updates. Thanks for your continued patience. " so they must be trying to fix the problem.
I was given my Vivofit for Christmas and Garmin Connect worked fine at first but now it no longer does, it stopped working totally for a while now some of the days steps are showing but it is also missing day and the same with the sleep. I am getting really frustrated and my daughter who bought it for me isn't happy either. Some days it didn't sync and other days it takes 2 or 3 goes before it works also I found I had to take the ANT stick from out of the back of my computer and put it into the front USB port then hold my hand down right next to it. Garmin Connect isn't working on my phone or my iPad either. Also is there somewhere I can find information on the graphs particularly the sleep graph, I have lots of blue pointing up and down but I don't understand what it all means ? At least the site has this message " We are experiencing issues with Garmin Connect. Our team is actively investigating the issue. Please visit our status page for updates. Thanks for your continued patience. " so they must be trying to fix the problem.
The vivofit can only be paired to one device at a time so you can't pair to the ANT stick and your phone and your iPad all at the same time.
The blue in the sleep graph is the level of activity while you were sleeping. If you had a restless night, the graphs will be tall and if you slept like a baby, they would be low. For example, if you get up in the middle of the night to pee, there will be a tall spike.
If you click on the status page link you should see that except for MyFitnessPal everything is stable.
I should of said when I couldn't get my vivofit to sync on my PC I thought I would try both my S4 phone and the iPad which it didn't work with either of them. Thank you too for the advice on the sleep graph, no wonder I feel awful when I wake up in the mornings as my graph shows me up and down all night !
I almost forgot to say my vivofit has gone back to not syncing at all again :(
Your ability to sync involves Garmin's servers accepting the data and processing it. My Vivosmart had problems today also. Connect is down and is not showing my synced data even though the Connect "Status" app says that it's working. It's not!
