Watch Model Market Share Data?

This info isn't available.  Even for your own app, you can see how many downloads you have, but no breakdown as far as Device A vs Device B, vs Device C.

For a device, what your app does can be as important as anything - Some things may be more popular on lower end devices vs higher end, for example.

Support as many devices  as you feel conformable with, and if someone wants it on a device you don't initially support, you can always add support for it later.

Anyone from Garmin want to comment?

Knowing the volumes of different models out in the world would make a huge difference to commercial decision making.

Take the Forerunner 235 as an example. I know anecdotally there are a lot around, very popular running and cycling watch. It only supports 1.4.4 (IIRC) and has limited memory so takes quite a bit more thought and effort to support - i.e. it costs more.

For a hobbiest putting together a little app to scratch their own itch, not knowing might be fine. But if I want to consider developing a paid app then I need to assess which models are worth building and testing for.

There's a lot that can determined based on what your app does.  For example, if you need ciq2 functionality, that eliminates CIQ1 devices. And if you need CIQ3 functionality, that eliminates CIQ1 and CIQ2 devices.  If you need CIQ BLE, that eliminates many, including some 3.1 devices. And I think very few people even consider supporting the EPIX these days.

but then there's also similarities.  Lets say you want to support the fenix 5 - when you do that, it also means you also support the f5s, f5x, and 935, (and variations) and based on your app, the fenix5 plus devices and variations.  MARQ devices, if you support 1, you support them all.  va4/va4s brings in all the legacy devices like Rey and Darth Vader.  If you look at the long list of device with this understanding, the number of different devices gets much shorter.

Using the 235 as an example, if you support that, the 230 and 735 come along, as does the 630 if you handle touch screens (though I think the 630 wasn't really that popular)

Not sure how sales numbers would add much.  I have a va,vahr and fr230, but I've probably not even charged them in well over a year, but they would be included in the sales numbers.  And when it comes to new devices, when they first come out, sales numbers don't really exist, but you probably want to support them just the same.

Hi Jim,

Thank for being an active member of the forums, you've really helped me a huge amount on other questions.

On this, I think you're missing the point. I'm trying to decide on where to spend limited devlopment time for a potential commercial venture. A monetised watch app.

In that context, knowing if 90% of the 8% market share of smartwatches that Garmin has is made up of runners with the 235 would change what I focus on.

It's also not as simple as what features are needed. The 235, for example, can do web calls from a widget no problem, but the structure of those web responses must be smaller to fit within memory constraints, so where one call would be fine on a Fenix, I have to break that down to 4 for the 235.

Knowing the model distribution is key to knowing if that's a worthwhile investment.

It's safe to say that 90% of what Garmin sells are not 235's 

@subra That's really helpful, thanks a lot.