Animation out of memory on some devices

Some older devices even have only 64 KB available for apps. The data field / widget size limit is even lower than the app limit.

I guess you could do a runtime check but personally I prefer to enable/disable features at compile-time, using annotations, as you typically save more memory that way (by omitting code you don't need for certain devices). This can be important if you need to support low-end or old devices.

You can see the memory limit for each device / app type by opening your Garmin root folder (*) and navigating to:

ConnectIQ\Devices\{device_id}\compiler.json

e.g.

ConnectIQ\Devices\fr245\compiler.json

(*)

Windows: %APPDATA%\Garnin\

MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Garmin/

Found it quite surprising; I view fenix range as more high end so really surprised Fenix 6 had such limited memory.
Even a Fenix 6; one of the newest models does not have much memory.

Only just read messages; I have tested with a runtime check switch to allow animation or a static message; maybe not best solution

Yeah Garmin has multiple levels of market segmentation / product differentiation which can be quite confusing. Seems to be working for them so far, though.

Even within the "high-end" range of watches (say, Fenix 6), there's still a low and high end model. The other thing is that one could argue "available RAM for apps" is not necessarily an end-user marketing bullet point, as users have no idea. It's not on a spec sheet anywhere.

Go with whatever code works for you. I'm used to coding mostly data fields (which have much less available memory) and/or trying to target every single watch that Garmin ever made, so I'm used to writing Garmin code in a certain way to maximize memory savings.

It's the music vs non music.  Music devices tend to have a huge amount of memory, and on top of that, the file system is MTP vs looking like a flash drive.  If you plug an f6 pro into a mac, you won't see it without something like like this: www.android.com/.../