Let's discuss the real secret of Connect IQ.

1341842 said:

I tried to appeal and also tried to write emails to the official staff, but received no feedback. That's why I'm writing this post.

For three or four years, Garmin has let everything slide, yet told me I violated the rules.

I tried to be a normal developer for a long time, but there was no response.

It wasn't until my account was frozen that I posted hundreds of comments, while those who had posted tens of thousands of comments over the years remained active.

Yeah unfortunately, the squeaky wheel gets the axe.

It's just like all those classic cases of regular people who reported security vulnerabilities in apps and websites, and instead of thanking them, the affected companies turned around and took legal action against them. It was conventional wisdom that if you saw a security issue (especially a major one), it would be better to keep your mouth shut than to report it. Companies don't care about actual problems - as long nobody says anything and it doesn't hurt their bottom line. They would be all to happy to go after any good samaritans who bring actual problems to their attention.

It's just like that one employee who complains a lil too much at work. Even if they have valid concerns, they're unlikely to be rewarded for their efforts.

You and Jim m are more like real Garmin employees. Although this is the official forum, it's rare to see official staff actually listening to feedback or giving even simple responses.

Half a year ago, I thought this was just a simple case of the Matthew Effect – top-ranked apps naturally get more downloads and reviews, which is why the top few developers have stayed the same for years. I asked if the number one spot could be given a weighting adjustment to balance exposure with genuine popularity. Many popular watch faces remain unseen, so their download counts are inevitably far lower than those at the top.

Of course, no one responded to me.

I also posted suggesting that the top spots seem reserved only for Garmin's official paid watch faces and those by special authors. Could the algorithm be adjusted to give other watch faces more exposure? Or perhaps a watch face shouldn't appear simultaneously across all ranking lists, hogging multiple exposure slots.

Again, no one responded.

Perhaps change will only come when this Connect IQ marketplace collapses under the weight of stupid fake review competitions.

Thank you to genuine contributors like you who actually solve developers' problems.

I don't work for Garmin and never have.  Right now I'm retired. I've done CIQ for over a decade - all different app types and using the app store most of that time.

When you posted 100's of reviews, it seems to me that probably violated one of the rules and you and your apps got banned..

And your users are impacted, because of your actions.

jim_m_58 said:

I don't work for Garmin and never have.  Right now I'm retired. I've done CIQ for over a decade - all different app types and using the app store most of that time.

They're saying it as a compliment, not as the usual insult. Notice how they said "thank you" at the end of their comment.

i.e.

(rare) compliment: "you are more of a garmin employee than the actual employees, because you are so helpful. thank you!"

(usual) insult: "you are more of a garmin employee than the actual employees, because you defend Garmin to the death. f u!"

The only recourse I can see is create a new account and change the app Id of your apps and upload them to that new account.  If these are paid apps, you may want to look at offering refunds or letting them get the new acct/new app id versions for free,

I'm trying, but the problem is that some users may not be able to find me. After the watch face is removed, there is only a blank when opening Connect IQ. If they don't have my contact information or they have forgotten the name of my watch face.

Users may only open Connect IQ once every few months.  

This is clearly a not well thought through decision and procedure from Garmin's part. I understand and even agree that they should crack down on developers who are abusing things, but they should do it in a way that it doesn't hurt their (meaning Garmin's) customers! If I as a user was using an app and it was deleted in a way that makes it completely useless I would be very angry. And if I knew the background story then I'd be angry with Garmin. They could freeze the account, make it impossible to find and install the app on any devices from now on, even delete the description and replace it with some explanation. But keep it (the settings) functioning!

As for many things that were assumed in this thread: I also believed once that having a high review / users ratio means something is too good to be true, but then someone here wrote that it's because in their app they pop up a review page to the users. I added that to some of my apps, and I can confirm that it indeed increases significantly the amount of reviews this app gets.

As for the real bad guys: I guess, if they really do reviews by some bots, then they don't use the same IP address (as probably you did) so it's more or less impossible to catch them. At least much harder to prove. And if they have the infrastructure and money to use these bots then probably they can also fake those user's activities, so they look more like a real user. Or they use accounts of real users who don't know that they're reviewing hundreds of apps every month....

Your explanation regarding the comment pop-ups is indeed valid. I'm uncertain whether watch faces have permission to implement this feature.

If the top-ranked products all employ this method, I acknowledge that they are defeating competitors through legal means.

In fact, on Chinese servers, among the top 50 watch faces, 25 are created by a single developer, while the remaining 25 belong to individuals with special methods.

This watch face, uploaded in 2018, has only 10 downloads in China, yet it's a popular watch face every day. The ridiculous thing is that the author didn't cheat, it was just a stupid bug.