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Connect IQ store spammed with low-quality apps and watch faces

Aaron
5 months ago

Lately, the Connect IQ store is getting spammed by a few unethical developers pumping out high-volume but low-quality copy-paste degenerate apps and watch faces. They are essentially the same, with only the background image changing and usually have 0 or low star reviews. See examples below (in all the categories):

This is displacing quality apps/watch faces that developers here are putting real effort into. This is a slap in the face to honest developers -- why bother trying hard to make a real app if it never gets a chance to appear in the CIQ store listings?

Garmin - Is there a plan to filter out these low-quality results? This is degrading the Connect IQ store experience. I used to remember seeing more quality listings, but now after scrolling past 1 page, all I get are these spam apps and watch faces. 

  • 4 months ago in reply to flocsy🤠

    That's really a shame, I expected better from Garmin.

    Garmin! Imagine the experience of the poor new Garmin owner who just spent $1000 on a watch.

    They are excited to discover there's a Connect IQ store where they can check out cool apps and watch faces to personalize their new watch...

    ... and then they see Lily Flower 1, Lily Flower 2, African Lily Flower 1, Sunset 1, Sunset 2, Beachside 1, ... 

    *BARF*

    All of these should have been a single watch face with all the variants as options in the Settings page.

    We're lucky the spammers haven't realized they could also start making watch face variants like "White text 1", "White text 2", "Blue text", "Red text", "24-hour clock format", "12-hour clock format", ... Cry

  • 3 months ago in reply to Aaron

    THIS. Fenix 7 was my first Garmin and my trust immediately ruined when I saw it's store. Searching for something valuable in place like this is like being a garbage man looking for something of value in a dumpster.

  • 10 days ago

    I posted a threat about this. These "developers" come from Huawei, they ruined Huawei watch face store causing the closure of new designs. Everyone got kicked out thanks to them and including them too because they spammed so much with their 5 minutes made watch faces and flooded the store, Huawei tried to fix it but it was too late so they just kicked everyone, good or bad designer, the store got flooded with that kind of trash but they didn't learn and they're doing it here now. Garmin watch face store is heading that direction now. 

    I've sent 2 emails about this to 

    [email protected] but no response yet. 

    Thanks to Kueski these people can now still in Garmin. 

    Disabling Kueski pay would fix a lot of that problem. 

  • 10 days ago in reply to FlowState

    There is a fix to this 5 minutes watch face "developers" 

    If Garmin removes Kueski as a payment method you'll see they will all be gone. 

    Many of these people are from an specific country cause i know them but i rather not say where but the only way they can get their money is thru KueskiBlush

  • 10 days ago in reply to JS ProDesign

    But Garmin doesn't have anything to do with 3rd party payment processors, and it's hard to see how they could effectively ban any of them, even if they wanted to.

    CIQ store app page: click on this link to the dev's website to purchase an unlock code!

    Dev's website: use [random payment processor] to unlock this app!

    (Or maybe I have that backwards? Even if they could ban them in theory, they probably wouldn't want to expend the resources to do so, as well as taking on possible liability if some court decides they're not allowed to do that. Not that the CIQ store is big enough for that to happen, probably)

    Anyway, Garmin explicitly said:

    https://support.garmin.com/en-CA/?faq=i0SOSmHg2mAAyCoKiV0f2A

    Payments related to these type of apps will be processed using a third-party payment service chosen by the app developer. Garmin does not review or manage these app payment services.

  • 10 days ago in reply to FlowState

    Maybe cancel developers from those 2 countries... Garmin knows which countries they're from and i can name them. 

    Same that Huawei did. Just that Huawei went to the extreme and allowed only one country to upload, everyone else bye bye. 

    Trust me, all the creators from these 2 countries are known in the watch face community as spammers, they don't care at all. 

  • 8 days ago

    My hope is that with Garmin getting a piece of the revenues via their own payment system in the app store they will have some motivation to fix this spam issue since it effects their bottom line (not much compared to selling watches but they spent money to add the payment feature so I'd assume they want some return on that investment).

  • 8 days ago in reply to pstoppani

    Maybe you're right, at least that was my first thought when I saw I need to pay $100 yearly. My second thought was that I closed the browser window, 'cause I don't think I'll ever get $100 a year, and that's not because of my data field being of bad quality, but because of the 200k downloads I didn't get $100 in donations...

  • 8 days ago in reply to pstoppani

    Garmin is asleep at the wheel here. Their Connect IQ store has degenerated into a dumpster and they have no interest in doing anything.

    Even their rep Brandon commented on one of these threads a few months ago that they intend for the store to be like the wild west where anything goes, with no attempt at any quality control.

  • 8 days ago in reply to pstoppani
    pstoppani said:
    they spent money to add the payment feature so I'd assume they want some return on that investment

    I think that was meant to attract the big corporate guns (cf years of complaints by Garmin users that the store is just hobbyist stuff but they want polished corporate apps).

    If those big corporations were already here and complaining about the state of the store, maybe something would get fixed. As it is, they'll probably continue to stay away (not just bc the store is full of spam), and the justified complaints of indie devs won't move the needle at all.