Facemaker v1.3.121

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and I don’t have any special knowledge or expertise about any of this

You aren’t the first person to create a 3rd party site which generates a CIQ PRG to be sideloaded onto the device, but you are first person (afaik) who wants to monetize this practice and work with Garmin.

Facemaker said:

I have been discouraged by a friend, regarding the inclusion of Garmin on my store, but I believe that this could be a very lucrative endeavour, for the both of us, Garmin and me.

How so? Will you give Garmin a cut of every sale? Or do you mean they just indirectly benefit through increased watch sales.

I have a hard time seeing Garmin formally partner with anyone like this to allow users to pay to sideload apps that sidestep the app store approval process (which naturally includes a security review). From Garmin’s POV, who’s liable if malware somehow gets installed on the device? There’s also the fact that app developers who wish their apps to be visible in the EU are now required to verify their identity to comply with the new EU Digital Services Act, which is another process that your scheme will seemingly sidestep. i.e. if designer A creates a watchface which is installed by user B in the EU, who’s the “developer” here? Is it you / your site, which generates the IQ file? Is it designer A? Both? Will Garmin be liable if you don’t fulfill the requirements of the DSA?

EDIT: now I see that the end user has to generate their own developer key. but unless that developer key is used on the Garmin CIQ store,  what I said above still seems to apply

I also have a hard time seeing Garmin tacitly approve of this either (specifically, the part where you create a market that charges money for sideloaded apps).

And afaik, it’s not like this is Apple, where Garmin is big enough that regulatory bodies would force them to open up to 3rd party app stores. 

Tbh, I think the only two realistic outcomes for calling attention to this are:

- Garmin ignores you

- Garmin tries to shut you down (and maybe they go after similar free sites)

Obviously sideloading exists solely to allow devs to easily test their apps on a real device before releasing to the store, and this type of usage is a loophole that Garmin is currently ignoring. I think the reason sideloading is currently simple and unrestricted is bc that way is easier for both developers and Garmin. I hope that never changes.

EDIT:

Then again, if it would work for WearOS, why not Garmin? One difference is that 3rd party stores already exist for Android. 

Anyway, good luck!

mcinner1 said:

And then the question is: how do one install the watchface from Facemaker‘s store to your watch. Sideload - really? That would be not a good solution.

Hmm, I was wrong. Unlike some of the other "DIY Garmin app" websites, Facemaker is a paid app that runs on a Windows PC and seems to require the user to generate a developer key.

[https://youtu.be/W9bCjM2GGGs?t=466]

I was thrown off by recent forum posts which were asking how to delete Facemaker sideloads (since Connect IQ on phones has had issues with that lately) - I assumed Facemaker was like some of those sites (where sideloading is the only option afaik.)

But if you have the ability (or requirement) to supply your own developer key, there's nothing stopping you from deploying the app to the Garmin Connect IQ store. (But if someone is making an app just for themselves, it seems unlikely they'd want to go through this process if they could just sideload the app instead.)

So the question becomes: will Garmin allow (and/or support) the creation of a "legit" 3rd party store? There's still the issue of app reviews and developer verification. And as you pointed out, it's still not possible to do a legit install from a third party store.

So maybe the intended deployment method is sideloading after all.

Thank you for your insight.
This is what I wanted, to know what you guys think and stir some discussion.

Sure, any designer could and should list his watchfaces on the Garmin store. That won't change.
I understand that currently, sales work by providing a code that enables the watchface,
I'm more than happy to provide such a mechanics, the only thing that would change would be the payment, that would be made through the Facemaker store.
The watch face could be listed on the Facemaker store and the purchase button would redirect to the Garmin store.

This is the temporary store link by the way: https://facemaker.pt/store
It still needs a lot of work but including Garmin would be simple.

Now, what if I also made the PRG available through the Facemaker store?
What is keeping people from installing 3rd party PRGs?
As far as I know, they're free to do it, right?

When I said it could be lucrative I meant watch sales for Garmin and Facemaker sales for me.
I know for a fact that many hobbyists buy watches just so they can customize it if they want.
Many of my customers buy Huawei and Amazfit, because first, they're cheaper and second, because they can customize it with custom watchfaces. Telegram is filled with channels dedicated to custom watchface design, each with thousands of users.
If customization became easy, many people would end up buying Garmin.

Anyway, thank you very much for chiming in.
I think the best approach is, maintain the current way, where the designer uploads the watchface to the Garmin store.
The Facemaker store would only index the watchfaces and by hitting purchase, the user would be taken to the Garmin store.
Simple as that.

Whenever there are questions about how to do this or that for a watch face I'm skeptical. How "good" will the new watch face be? And when I write "good" I mean battery life. Do you have some insigths about that? Have you run one of the generated watchfaces for 2 weeks and can you tell us how it compares to other popular (and I may guess, thus "verified" by the hundreds of thousands of users) CIQ watch faces and the built-in Garmin watch faces?

Also: what features do you support? I'm not that much into design, as long as it has a huge time in the middle, and some other things I can display around it according to my choice.

Ah, and one more thing: I clicked on the youtube video, but when I saw it's 2 hours I closed it. Even if I wanted to learn how to use it I wouldn't have 2 hours to see it, certainly if I only want to use a watchface as a user. You should create a much shorter (max 5 min) video to "sell" me the idea to even try it.

I can't answer that, because I didn't even bought a Garmin watch yet.
The implementation is on it's early stages and I'm sure I can further optimize the watchfaces.
All the generated Monkey C code is sort of serialized and cookie cut.
And sure, Facemaker relies heavily on images to do it's thing, I'm not sure what the impact will be on the device's battery, but I guess I'll know soon enough

No, it's not about sideloading, although I'm asking what you guys think about sideloading.
The FM store would be an indexer basically and the user would be taken to the Garmin store.

This is the best option in my opinion and one that would maintain trust with Garmin users.

Facemaker said:

I think the best approach is, maintain the current way, where the designer uploads the watchface to the Garmin store.
The Facemaker store would only index the watchfaces and by hitting purchase, the user would be taken to the Garmin store.

Facemaker said:

No, it's not about sideloading, although I'm asking what you guys think about sideloading.
The FM store would be an indexer basically and the user would be taken to the Garmin store.

This is the best option in my opinion and one that would maintain trust with Garmin users.

Interesting. Seems like you’ve really thought this through. If your store is just another way of directing users to the real CIQ store, then most of my objections go away.

Facemaker said:

Now, what if I also made the PRG available through the Facemaker store?
What is keeping people from installing 3rd party PRGs?
As far as I know, they're free to do it, right?

Yeah but Garmin might not like it if you charge for it. At the very least, they might ask you not to use their logo on your site. Even if you keep sideloads free, they might not like the idea of a whole alternate store which basically circumvents all review / security / developer verification processes inherent in the CIQ store.

Ofc ppl are free to sideload 3rd party IQ files, but again it’s a security risk and it completely circumvents the Garmin store. So let’s say you put Garmin’s logo on your store and your store allows sideloads. From Garmin’s POV, if something bad happens with one of these sideloads (security or device stability issues), it might look like it’s their fault. Let’s say your store becomes really popular. Maybe users will start regularly contacting Garmin if they have issues with apps from your store, and they might not like that. Garmin Support already tells users to uninstall CIQ apps lol. Imagine the advice they’d give to a user of a third party store.

As far as I know, Garmin never intended sideloads to be an alternate method of distributing software, it’s just a convenience for devs.

As I implied above, if 3rd-party sideloading gets big enough, it’s a possibility that Garmin will simply lock down sideloads to curtail the practice. Garmin has already made one significant change which affects sideloads: in the past, when you copied (sideloaded) any type of app to your device, it would remain visible in the file system so you could copy it off the device. You could also copy off apps that were downloaded from the store in the same way. But since the advent of music provider apps, some types of apps are hidden as soon as they’re copied to the device (whether by sideload or installation from the store), so it’s impossible to copy them off the device. 

As a counter-example, Apple is being forced to officially support 3rd party sideloads but only in the EU. The situation there might be different considering the relative market sizes of Apple and Garmin. Afaik if you sideload an app to your iPhone, it expires after a couple of weeks, unless you have a dev account.

I’m curious whether your friend gave any reasons for discouraging you from doing this.

Hi!

My friend advised me against it because he was a Garmin developer some time ago.
He knows Garmin customers and said people wouldn't be installing watchfaces from some place other than the Garmin store.
I understand that and it makes sense.

But I've already decided on what to do. My store will be an indexer basically, that will redirect people to the Garmin store.
And I'll offer the same thing as kiezelpay, but with smaller fees.

my opinion is that it is a waste of time to develop something like that for garmin. I also created something for significantly easier work with graphics and absolutely no interest from the developers. zero. another thing, which in my opinion is much more important, is that this will create a huge number of spammers. garmin gallery is already in an absolutely catastrophic state as far as spammers are concerned. the same people insert several essentially template dials every day, where they change the background image and move objects, change colors. for me, for someone who struggles with graphics and I sit over drawing for long hours, this is very killing, because I can't publish several dials every day. unfortunately, I jumped on this ship late and as a new developer I have absolutely no chance of becoming more visible in the gallery. they have it set up very badly. Generic dials will immediately be pushed to the unknown, something new that I will add to the gallery.

but whatever you decide, I wish you a lot of success