Whatever you do, own it with Instinct^® 2X Solar. This bold, rugged GPS smartwatch is tough enough to keep up with you and unique enough to fit your style. Take on life’s unlimited possibilities with preloaded activity profiles, health metrics, an LED flashlight and extended battery life, thanks to the Power Glass solar charging lens.

The Instinct 2X Solar series are now available from the Connect IQ SDK manager. Update your apps to support them today.

Introduce the rider you are today to the one you’ll be tomorrow. The Edge® 540 and Edge 840 series of touchscreen cycling computers offers targeted adaptive coaching when used with your compatible power meter and heart rate monitor. Get superior positional accuracy in the most challenging environments, thanks to multi-band GNSS technology.

The Edge 540 and Edge 840 series are now available from the Connect IQ SDK manager. Update your apps to support them today.

Train brilliantly with the Forerunner® 265 and 965 running watches. Their colorful AMOLED touchscreen display stands out while the morning report, with HRV status, gives health insights (data presented is intended to be a close estimation of metrics tracked). The training readiness feature, which tells you when you’re primed for a productive session, helps you crush your goals. The Forerunner 965 full-color, built-in maps keep you on track when you’re en route.

The Forerunner® 265 series and Forerunner 965 are now available from the Connect IQ SDK manager. Update your apps to support them today.

Connect IQ System 6 is here. We’ve made improvements across the software development cycle to make it easier and faster to create must-have apps.

Complications

The Complications API provides a new unified API for watch faces to access the data available from Garmin wearables. This gives watch faces new, powerful capabilities. They can programmatically query data that’s available from the system to access it via a unified schema, and they can support hold-to-launch functionality available on fēnix® 7 and Venu® 2 series products.

All Connect IQ device apps can become complication publishers, allowing them to publish data for display in Connect IQ watch faces.

Personality UI

Personality UI is designed to create a system that simplifies supporting product personalities. It combines the new property language Monkey Style, a new design library, and new device APIs. Using our new library of selectors, you can unify your layout code and have it adapt across the System 6 products.

We’ve also added access to multi-band GPS, action menus, toasts, Instinct 2 icon improvements and the fēnix 7X flashlight. See the Personality Library for more information.

On Device Store

Our new on-device store rolled out earlier this month. System 6 devices will also allow users to find data fields within the activity data field editor. Make sure you update your app meta-data to support the new on-device browsing.

Tooling

We’ve continued to improve our build toolchain and Visual Studio extension, including support for Monkey Style and improvements with the type-system and optimizer.

Try it Today!

The Connect IQ SDK version 4.2 with System 6 support is out today and is available from the SDK manager. The following devices have been updated with System 6 support: 

• Enduro
• Enduro 2
• epix (Gen 2)
• Instinct® 2 Series
• Instinct Crossover
• fēnix 6 series
• fēnix 6 Pro series
• fēnix 7 series
• Forerunner® 55
• Forerunner 255 series
• Forerunner 955
• MARQ® series 
• MARQ 2 series
• Venu 2 series
• Venu 2 Plus
• Venu Sq 2 series

Support for Edge® 1040 series and Edge Explore 2 will be coming later this year. Get the SDK today and update your apps to take advantage of these new features.

The newest version of the Connect IQ On-Device store is here! This version allows users to browse and install apps directly from their devices. Make sure your apps are ready by following these steps.

In addition, new metrics are also available to add to your apps today! If your apps support System 5 devices or above, you can now see breakdowns of your app versions and device usage in the store. 

You’ll find the new metrics that are available under the “Statistics” tab of your app description.

The Connect IQ System 6 beta 2 is now available via the SDK manager. This update fixes numerous reported issues with the beta 1 SDK.

If you'd like to test System 6 on your device, the Garmin Beta Program is publishing alpha and beta builds with Connect IQ System 6. Builds are available for the following devices:

 Firmware is coming soon for the Edge® 1040 via the beta program as well. You can follow these instructions to enroll in the beta program for your device.

Get the SDK, get a System 6 firmware beta, and try out the upcoming System 6 today!

The newest version of the Connect IQ On-Device store is coming soon! The new version allows users to browse and install your apps directly from their devices.

Get your apps ready! Here’s what you can do to make sure your apps look their best in the new store.

One: Upload new icons

When users browse the On-Device store, your app icon will be scaled for the user’s device by default. Of course, what looks good on mobile and web, doesn’t necessarily look good when reduced to 64 colors on a Fenix.

Ensure your icons look good on all devices. To do that, you can now upload two icons: one for low-color devices like Fenix (64 color), and one for high-color devices like the Epix and Venu Sq 2 (24 bit per pixel).

When editing your app details, you’ll see a new option in the Cover Image & Icons section to upload your new icons for the On-Device store:

Click Yes to see the options to upload two new icons.

This new setting allows you to upload quality iconography exclusively for the On-Device store, while keeping your existing iconography for mobile and web.

Two: Associate activity types

In the updated On-Device store, users will be able to find your data field directly within related activities on their devices. To associate your data field with activities, fill out the new Activity Types section of your app details page.

Within that section, select all activities related to your data field. For example, if your data field is aimed at cyclists exclusively, you can select just the cycling activity type. If your data field can be used for multiple different activities, select as many types as are relevant.

Try it today!

The updates to edit your metadata are rolling out TODAY! Check it out in the app store now. Edit your app description to take full advantage of our upcoming on-device experience.

We announced the 2022 Developer Awards winners at this year's Garmin Developer Virtual Conference. If you missed the event, we have listed the winners on the Garmin blog.

Congratulations to all our winners, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store for next year!

We've released Connect IQ SDK version 4.1.6, which includes new compiler optimization features, analog clock hand support for Instinct Crossover and several bug fixes. We've also updated the VS Code extension to 1.0.7, which should also be installed with 4.1.6 to ensure proper function. Here is a list of the changes and updates:

General Changes

• Add analog clock hand APIs.
• Add new Activity.SPORT_* and Activity.SUB_SPORT_* enum values.
• Add GPS Mode API.
• Change Ant.BurstPayload.size and Ant.BurstPayload.burstDataBlob to private.
• Fix an issue that prevented data fields with developer data from being able to start if they previously crashed.
• Fix a text rendering issue with transparent background color on forerunner55.
• Fix unicode characters being dropped off in debugger messages for string variables.
• Update typing on Media.setAlbumArt, Communications.openWebpage, and WatchUi.switchToView.

Simulator Changes

• Add GPS Modes support.
• Add support for Instinct Crossover.
• Fix RunNoEvil failed to start error for music apps issue.
• Fix music app crash when changing settings.
• Fix an issue that caused the DeviceSettings.isTouchScreen flag to be improperly set after launching a device.
• Update heart rate zone labels in the user profile dialog.
• Allow starting a stopped activity in the simulator.

Compiler Changes

• Add compiler optimizations.
• Add compiler logging for submitting bug reports.
• Add resource file information to resource errors and warnings.
• Add support for setting ‘project.typecheck’ and ‘project.optimization’ properties in a Jungle file.
• Enable type checking by default.
• Allow WeakReference to be explicitly or implicitly casted.
• Fix the type checker to only generate a type check warning when doing a ‘instanceof’ operation on type Any.
• Fix bug in converting settings resources to JSON.
• Fix bug in check for ambiguous import statements, which caused an error to be generated for duplicate import statements.
• Fix a bug in code generation that caused classes with the same name as the extends class name to be looked up rather than the actual super class.
• Fix a bug where nested Array and Dictionary types caused an error.
• Fix a bug where imported modules were applied outside of their scope.
• Fix a bug where local variables with the same name as an imported module were sometimes mistakenly treated as the imported module.
• Fix a bug where some const variables were using the inferred type of the variable instead of the type declared during initialization.
• Fix a bug which did not allow nested classes to lookup symbols in its module hierarchy.
• Fix bugs in the type checker’s lookup algorithm, which should replicate the virtual machine’s lookup algorithm.
• Add type check error when casting a function definition.
• Ignore invalid devices with MonkeyMotion entry point when using the -m option.
• Fix a bug when using the ‘me’ keyword that caused type checking to error that the ‘me’ variable is uninitialized.
• Fix a type checking bug in expression type testing for String additions with Boolean and Symbol types.

Good afternoon Connect IQ developers! We're sure many of you have seen the new Instinct Crossover that was released today—we have a 4.1.6 SDK coming tomorrow that's required to develop apps for it. We're excited to see what you make!