Connect IQ Store: Separate “New Releases” From Recently Updated Apps

100% agreed. I’ve been running into the exact same issue, and it's killing visibility for newer creators.

Right now, the "Sort by New" filter and the "Trending & New" sections are fundamentally misleading. Instead of showcasing genuinely new releases, they seem to prioritize minor version bumps from the same 2–3 dominant developers whose watch faces have been on the store for months or years.

Meanwhile, if you launch a truly new watch face that actually gains early traction and solid download numbers, it gets buried almost immediately, while stagnant apps with zero downloads somehow remain in the rotation.

If sorting by New doesn't filter by the actual original release date, the feature defeats its own purpose. It creates an uneven playing field and discourages developers from bringing fresh ideas to the platform.

If you are just starting, you want your new app to be visible, but after you are established, you also want updates to apps to be very visible too,

In the mobile app, there is "Hot and Fresh " which are apps from the last 4 months

I mentioned about how updated apps are being shown. Users should be able to choose what they want to see - "Updated" or "New Releases". Currently, when you select "Recent", it doesn't actually show recent releases; it shows updated apps as well.

And to be honest, I'm shocked that such a big company as Garmin does it this way - mixing recently released apps with recently updated ones under the same sorting option.

That's totally wrong. It ruins the experience for both developers and users. Users don't get a proper way to discover new apps because the list is dominated by older apps that have simply been updated. And for developers, it kills the visibility of newly released apps.

That’s not really the core issue. They need a TikTok-style recommendation feed that regularly rotates in a fresh selection. Watch faces a user has already downloaded or installed shouldn’t keep taking up exposure slots. It should work like video recommendations. Their current system fails to help users discover new watch faces or give new releases any visibility. With AI, I could design a better recommendation system than theirs in just 20 minutes.

They don’t know how to give creators appropriate ranking weights, give high-quality work more weight, or measure genuine popularity.

If they followed your suggestion and simply sorted watch faces by release date, it would be an absolute disaster. With AI automation, a single creator can churn out 30 junk watch faces a day. Imagine hundreds of low-quality creators doing that: they would get 1,000 times more exposure than you because they would fill the listings with new releases. Users would never find your watch face buried three to five pages deep—unless you’re also making AI-generated watch faces.

But that's exactly what's already happening with low-quality crap. Some developers release 30 junk apps a day, and they all show up under the "New Releases" sorting category. On top of that, the same developer can update 30 junk apps daily, and those also end up under "New Releases."

So all I'm asking is to AT LEAST separate updates from actual new releases.

Of course, there's much more that could be improved, but at least don't flood the "New Releases" section with updated.

You  are talking the web based store and not the mobile app, right?

I'd expect the mobile app to be used much more by end users.  I pretty much stopped using the web based store when the ability to install other devs apps from there was removed a few years back.

Oh, wait..  I see "recent" was added to the mobile app at some point..  I must have missed it.. Sorry..  I usually just go with the default.  I'm seeing some of my apps there - the ones I just updated for the new E4.

Mobile app store. I doubt normal users are using web store to get apps, at least i don't know any. 

And yes that "recent" is not really recent as it shows also "updated" apps which should have it's own "updated" listing.

Recently added or recently updated are both recent to me.

One thing that can help is also saying you only want to see free apps.   In general, you may find better quality there. You don't see one dev with 500 new apps, for example.

Are you even a developer? Or did you just discover AI and now think you're a developer because you can build things with it? Any real developer will tell you that "released" and "updated" are two different things which should have two different sortings.

Okay, maybe the naming isn't the best, and "Recent" could technically refer to both. But in that case, there should be two separate categories: "New Releases" and "Recently Updated."

As a user, when I select "Recent," I expect to see newly released apps, not apps that were released years ago and have simply been updated recently.

Jeeez... There's already an option to filter apps by Free or Paid.

And yes, there are developers with 500+ apps. Just look at this: Apps by GreenPoint | Connect IQ Store

Almost 1,000 watch faces, and nearly half of them are practically identical. The only differences are a few pixels here and there or a different background image. Instead, the developer could have just created a single watch face with an option to customize the background image.

I've been a .NET and Angular developer since before AI became a thing and I'm new to developing watch faces myself and still learning, but even I understand that it's not normal to publish a bunch of practically identical watch faces and see that there are a lot of things wrong.

I've been doing CIQ since 2015 and a programmer since the 1970's and have apps with up to 700,000 downloads.