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Are must pay apps good for Garmin?

Former Member
Former Member over 4 years ago

The Garmin core values: "The foundation of our culture is honesty, integrity, and respect for associates, customers, and business partners."

How does locking the watch with a must pay message fit with these values? Does this show respect for customers? 

Is this a good user experience?

Is the "Payment Required" label sufficient?

Does Garmin want to be associated with ransomware?

Did Garmin test the purchase process? Does Garmin approve?

Is it respectful to call customers lazy?
Is maximizing profit all that matters?
Does the customer deserve to be tricked into paying?

Do no trial apps help in providing quality content?

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Garmin isn't connected to the payment service.  In the mobile app, there's an "i" next to "payment required" and when you tap on it, you get this:

    Requiring a user to pay before download would put Garmin in the middle of the whole payment process, and I don't think they want to go there.

    Seems Kpay needs to provide some easy to find instructions on what to do if you don't want to pay - how to uninstall, etc. Probably both in the app description as well as on the site where users pay.

    This time of year with the holidays and people getting their first Garmin, switching to another watch face or uninstalling might not be real obvious to lots of users.  I can tell there are a whole bunch of new users based on the number of very basic questions I've gotten with my own apps the last week or so.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jim_m_58

    This suggestion is on point and it should be addressed. Yes, developers should be able to monetize their hard work, but also the app store still must be valuable to people. If the most of the trending apps do not work after startup, there is something wrong with the overal experience. People will not trust the Connect IQ and it will hurt all developers.

    On Apple store there is a rule that the free/trial app must provide a value. You cannot just publish an app with a login screen, or a payment screen.

    On Samsung Tizen you need to pay for the watchface first, only then it's transfered to the watch.

    I agree that the current "Payment Required" button is not enough and I also heard complains from other people "why my watch stopped working", when this screen was displayed.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to TomasSlavicek

    On things like Apple and Samsung, I'm willing to bet that they have people that actually run and test an app before it's approved.  That's not the case with CIQ - it's a small group.  So there's trust involved.

    When an app does nothing unless you pay, or has very obvious bugs, that reflects on all the CIQ apps, and trust is a hard thing to earn.  When CIQ first started, the first thing support would tell people is to delete all their CIQ apps, even when CIQ clearly wasn't involved in a problem.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jim_m_58

    Yes, on Samsung they test every update, at least on two or three devices. They even log in to our service, go outside and record a short tour on a GPS. They were able to catch one bug that happened only on a new Galaxy Watch 3.

    Even on Google Play, when we used too many permissions (for example to access both SMS messages and phone contacts), our app was flagged as suspiscious and they have tested manually all our updates.

    CIQ store is very simple… No public beta, no staged rollouts, no support for inapps (even when the trial API has been mentioned since the 2017 summit). I think there should be a plan how to make this better.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to TomasSlavicek
    jim_m_58 said:
    When an app does nothing unless you pay, or has very obvious bugs, that reflects on all the CIQ apps, and trust is a hard thing to earn

    on the garmin platform an extra problem is that a screenshot in the ciq store does often not reflect on how it will look like on the actual watch (given the watches low resolution and screen technology)

    TomasSlavicek said:
    the app store still must be valuable to people

    TomasSlavicek said:
    On Apple store there is a rule that the free/trial app must provide a value. You cannot just publish an app with a login screen, or a payment screen.

    i think it would have been a good thing to have opted for the same mechanism as apple store for this case and that garmin would've disallowed apps that require immediate payment after download.

    how does Apple store handle apps that lock out after a limited time trial or do they disallow that type of app as well?