The Connect IQ Store is getting worse by the day by a few developers who dump a shitload of *** watch faces

I know I am in that 95% of watch face developers that don’t make anything great that you spoke of earlier.  However, the main reason I am on Garmin is because I can develop the watch face I want (for free).  I release them to CIQ to make it easy for me to download.  Plus…at least 5 other people do use them (haha).  The only other main stream watch with the battery life of the Garmin is Fitbit.  I left Fitbit because of a time change/sync issue.  My point is, lose the CIQ store and lose those of us niche users to Garmin completely.

Obviously no-one in this discussion forum is on Garmins payroll to be able to convey our gripes to those in charge.  Everyone PLEASE use this form to send a message to Garmin about this problem.  I have just done so.

support.garmin.com/.../

yeah, well, before that I'd like the forum to be fixed :) 

I used to develop watch faces, mostly to solve my own problems/desires but no longer do, and now only really maintain the ones that I've already built. I stopped because there wasn't an easy way to monetize, because it was hard to get noticed, but mostly because I found users to be overly fickle and wanted a crazy level of customization that I wasn't prepared to support. So I understand the frustration being vented here

But these suggestions of simply eliminating the Connect IQ platform is madness. Connect IQ allows for other app types, which many of the longtime developers build; activities, data fields, and widgets, while considerably less prevalent, provide additional functionality outside of the native OS. I would much rather have apps like Spotify be an installable option rather than baked into the firmware.

And that Garmin doesn't care is craziness also. You are seeing a lack of caring from a developer perspective; that is, you see an app store full of perceived "junk" watch faces, most of which have likely been auto-coded using that website. But what Garmin sees is a robust store with tens of thousands of watch faces to suit any users needs. To me, this is no different than how there are twenty different sellers offering the same (or eerily similar) crappy precision screwdriver set with a different name on them; it's not that Amazon doesn't care, as long as the vendor isn't being deceitful then they simply see it as lots of vendors with lots of offerings. Frankly, I would much rather have an open store with lots of things than an app store like Apple has where they decide that your app isn't good enough or isn't "Apple like" enough.

Can the Garmin Connect IQ App Store be improved? Most certainly. But all that has happened is that because of the congestion of similarly themed watch faces, the Connect IQ store has reached a point in its evolution earlier than it might have. This is no different than the Apple App Store; in the early days there were considerably fewer apps and developers were seeing their apps in the "new apps" section get quick traction and were making big dollars from their 99 cent apps. But those days are over and now it's all about traditional marketing, plus the use of influencers and other social media hype stuff. If you have a new, amazing Garmin watch face and are confident you can make money from it, then there are likely ways to get traction. But this is predicated on the fact that you need to believe you can make enough money from watch face purchases. Personally, I don't think there's much money to be made in watch faces, even if you removed all the congestion in the Connect IQ store.