I give up on Garmin Connect IQ. My thoughts.

Have you developed an app for another wearable product?

Have you developed an app for another wearable product?

I have good experience in software development but never worked with wearables, this was my first attempt and I think I will wait until I find an Android gps watch.

Well, I have experience with developing for several different wearable platforms and I can tell you that while Connect IQ is not the most straightforward approach, it is not the worst one. I have an app ready in three days. Along with an Android companion app.

Btw, if you use a companion app, you can overcome some of the issues you are rightly complaining about - like file read/write.

Thanks for your honest feedback--we know that we won't be able to please everyone all the time, and encourage developers to let us know about the things they like and the things they don't. While we don't decide on Connect IQ features and enhancements by democracy, we consider all of the feedback we receive. :)

You have some valid criticisms here, so I'd like to try to address some of your concerns:

Read/Write file support. I have a device with 8GB of memory and I cannot read/write data from it?

In the short term the object store was selected as Connect IQ's local storage option. Some of this is due to memory/storage restrictions, and some is because we wanted to avoid apps writing arbitrary data to the mass storage volume of the device. There are plans for more storage options in the future, like FIT file recording, which will allow developers to write their own data to the FIT file rather than the only allowing activity information supported by the device

Reliable HTTP connection without Garmin Connect and/or JSON dependencies. Another 'must'. Not everybody can develop a web service that gets the information from some URL and then translates it back to JSON format for the Garmin device.

We know that makeJsonRequest isn't an ideal solution for everyone, but it covers a lot of use cases we had in mind early on. One of the biggest things we've been wanting to include is a way to do authenticated requests since many services require it, and we're working on that. A bigger limitation of makeJsonRequest (aside from requiring a JSON response) is the limited memory available for the response. Some of this will ease up in the future as our devices become more capable, and some will be addressed as we expand communications capabilities. We're in agreement with your comments here, so the most I can do is ask for your patience. :)

Unique Device ID. I might need to store the Device ID somewhere (to avoid a user to having to identify himself manually, for example) to do many things such as storing persistently device's preferences, or just checking if a device is in a list (subscriptors or premium users).

Yep, agree here, too. Initially, we didn't consider this a critical use case, but we see many developers are interested in this information. We have a task on the books to include this in a future release.

Backwards compatibility. I see many complaints on apps working wrongly in v.1.2.2 when they where OK in v.1.2.0.

Some of the upgrade trouble reported recently is firmware-related, not because of Connect IQ. I don't mean to pass the buck, but it's important to make that distinction. We always try to ensure forward compatibility (e.g. 1.2.0 apps will run on devices that support 1.2.2), though we may introduce breaking changes between major versions. We can't guarantee full backward compatibility since it's possible a newer SDK version will include support for an API that did not exist in earlier versions. There are ways to check for this sort of thing, however, and handle it in your app.

That said, I do admit that we had a couple of issues come up with the 1.2.2 release that had some unintended consequences. For example, we changed our memory management system in preparation for supporting future devices, and there were some hidden bits of overhead that caused memory use to increase just enough that some apps would no longer run without tweaking. That's being addressed right now.

At least they should have a set of 'test-apps' (more complex than the default samples provided) and have them recompiled with this new SDK before releasing it.

We have unit tests and test apps that we build and run to help validate changes with each SDK release. These apps, which include some of the samples and some other non-released apps, are distributed to the device teams for verification on devices. Is there room for improvement in our testing procedures? Definitely.

I think Garmin should use this same SDK to develop their apps....

Ahem: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/developer/e1683f31-54fe-45d9-9aa8-cba39fe7fd1f/apps ;)

On the contrary, we have several teams outside of the Connect IQ team that develop official Garmin-branded apps using the same SDK that is available to everyone else. There are also several Garmin employees on and off the Connect IQ team that build apps on their own time and release them under their own name.

Logs. The developer should have the ability to create a log/trace, so that if a user reports a problem, the developer can ask for the log file inmediatly.

There are actually a few different logs available related to Connect IQ. See the new developer FAQ for some information on them. We realize there is a need for a true debugger, and hope to have one available soon.

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We honestly do appreciate your comments. Hopefully you can see that many of the issues you've mentioned are things that were done intentionally (even if you may not agree with our reasoning), or are things we're aware of and are working to address. Perhaps you'll be willing to give us another try in the future!

Thank you very much for you honest answer. I really appreciate being able to talk honestly.

I know many of my issues could be worked around for example making a companion Android/iOS app, but I didn't see the point of making a simple weather app for the watch, that needed a mobile companion app (as I already have a weather app in the mobile)

I understand the problems involved in software development, but I'm glad to hear that the Connect IQ SDK is the one used by Garmin itself, and also I'm happy to see that you listen to complaints.

I really expect the Framework to get more reliable and full of new features. I guess instead of saying 'I give up' now I have to say that I will wait and see, to check if newer versions of the SDK get more stable and work for me.

Keep up the good work. I've always found Garmin products to be very good, and expect it's SDK to be as good too.