Connect IQ Monetization System vs own payment system - increase in sales?

It is suprising that the payment system works only for new devices 

Yes, it is rather strange!

"When you list an app for sale, it will only be offered on these products:"

Category	Products
Running	Forerunner® 165 Series, Forerunner 255 Series, Forerunner 955 Series, Forerunner 265 Series, Forerunner 570 Series, Forerunner 965 Series and Forerunner 970 Series
Outdoor	Approach® S50, Approach S70 Series, D2 Air X15, D2 Mach 1 Pro, D2 Mach 2, Descent Mk3 Series, Enduro 2, Enduro 3, epix (Gen 2), epix Pro (Gen 2) Series, fēnix® 6 Pro Series, fēnix 7 Series, fēnix 8 Series, fēnix E, Instinct® 3 AMOLED Series, Instinct 3 Solar Series, Instinct Crossover AMOLED, MARQ® (Gen 2) Series, tactix® 7 AMOLED Edition and tactix 8 Series
Wellness	Venu® Sq. 2 Series, Venu 3 Series, Venu 4 Series, vívoactive® 5, Venu X1 and vívoactive 6

Yeah, we'll never know why. Probably the OS checks something. Maybe paid apps are being signed by Garmin before you down load them to prevent side losing them to another device.

There's a DataField I was using. It was free. Then it suddenly started to crash as I opened the activity in the watch. It turned out that the crash is somehow related to the fact that the developer turned it into Garmin Pay. It's a shame because I would be happy to use the existing, last free version, but now I was forced to decide to pay or remove it.

So probably the same would happen to anyone already paid via 3rd party payment system (maybe not for those who are on old device that is not supported, but we can't be sure)

SzymonP said:

It is suprising that the payment system works only for new devices 

flocsy🤠 said:

Yeah, we'll never know why. Probably the OS checks something. Maybe paid apps are being signed by Garmin before you down load them to prevent side losing them to another device.

That's not "why", that's "how". I think when SzymonP said "it is suprising that the payment system works only for new devices", he was referring to Garmin's decision for it to be that way (monetization is restricted to newer devices), not the technical details of how the restriction is accomplished.

Yes, it sucks that apps which used to be free may crash once they are changed to use Garmin Pay, but I don't think that's what he was talking about. Besides, the docs on monetization do say that once an app is changed to use monetization, existing users are asked to either pay or stop using the app (I think the actual wording is closer to: they have pay if they wish to continue using the app). (The details of how the user would be forced to stop using the app were always fuzzy, but I guess now we know.) This does contradict some earlier talk about how users could just choose not to upgrade and thereby continue to use the last free version of an app, but oh well.

Anyway, just my 2 cents, but I don't think the restriction itself it's surprising at all. Seems to me that in recent years, Garmin has chosen to move away from supporting older devices, and this decision looks like one of the ways that Garmin is focusing on newer devices.

e.g.

- System 7 (and beyond) only supports CIQ 5 devices (which includes devices which were formerly CIQ 4). Old CIQ 3 devices have been abandoned (in the sense that they no longer get CIQ updates). Recall the entire "System X" scheme was created in the first place so that CIQ could roll out releases which had new features for both old CIQ 3 devices and newer CIQ 4 devices

- The forums for all devices older than a certain age were suddenly archived. (This is *not* something that had previously happened on any kind of rolling basis - it looks like like at some point, "management" just said "archive the forums for all devices older than X years / Y date.)

- Monetization is only for newer devices (except for Fenix Pro Series, which is the oldest group of devices supporting monetization, especially when you consider it's the only group of monetized devices which is on CIQ 3 and not CIQ 4/5)

Speaking anecdotally, I know a lot of fast runners who still rock an FR235 or FR920XT, or did so until very recently, including a guy who literally won a 5 miler. 

I think at some point Garmin noticed that people were holding onto their watches for 10+ years, and decided to take steps to discourage that. Obviously they won't go so far as cutting those devices off of Connect (I hope), but I can def see why they'd limit CIQ monetization. It's kind of a win-win afaict: either users don't care about CIQ / monetized CIQI apps so it doesn't bother them either way or they do care, so they have additional motivation to get a new watch.

I think you're wrong in your last paragraph. In theory it would make sense for Garmin to make paid apps possible in as many as possible devices - after all it would mean more potential buyers, and Garmin gets their 15% - however I suspect that 2 more things also play role in the decision: 1. The number of people still using old devices (we don't know but Garmin does), 2. The chance that someone using an old device will pay (even if only 2-5 USD) is probably smaller than someone who paid hundreds of dollars recently.

Besides you're the one who tells us all the time that most users don't even know that there is a store, let alone use it.

Don't do it.

I'm 10 months in and haven't seen a dime. The support at [email protected] is useless—I've emailed them repeatedly and they just ignore me. It's incredibly frustrating.

I think you're wrong in your last paragraph. In theory it would make sense for Garmin to make paid apps possible in as many as possible devices - after all it would mean more potential buyers, and Garmin gets their 15% - however I suspect that 2 more things also play role in the decision: 1. The number of people still using old devices (we don't know but Garmin does), 2. The chance that someone using an old device will pay (even if only 2-5 USD) is probably smaller than someone who paid hundreds of dollars recently.

That's fair. Whether - in this case - Garmin wants to actively encourage people to buy new devices, or they simply don't care about supporting older devices, the reality is they don't support older devices for monetization. And it just so happens to align with their recent decisions to mothball a bunch of old device forums as well as stop releasing new CIQ versions for older devices (i.e. they used to support CIQ 3 devices and CIQ 4 devices in parallel, and now they only support CIQ 5 devices, which used to be CIQ 4)

I simply see a pattern of dropping support for old devices in a way that hasn't been done before. For years they kept those old device forums and for years they had dual-track support for CIQ devices, then suddenly they reversed course on both of those things.

Whether it's because they simply don't care about old devices or they're hoping this will actually convince people to upgrade doesn't really matter to me.

All I'm saying is that to me it's fairly clear that somebody made the decision to stop supporting older devices. I think if monetization had come out 2-3 years earlier, it's entirely possible that all CIQ devices would have been supported.

Besides you're the one who tells us all the time that most users don't even know that there is a store, let alone use it.

Yeah and I still stand by that. I've run with a lot of Garmin users of different athletic backgrounds (from subelite to 5 hour marathoner), ages, and walks of life. The vast majority of Garmin-using runners use their watch as a Strava recording/syncing machine. If they look at stats at all, they only care about time, distance, pace, and maybe HR.

I don't know anyone irl who knows or cares about CIQ, except tangentially (maybe they installed Spotify). They sure don't go around looking for useful Connect IQ data fields or apps to install on their watch.

I know a good number of runners who've had a 5 button Forerunner for years, and they still don't know that you hold UP for the context-sensitive menu. Surely Garmin is aware of this too, which is why they've made a couple of UI changes over the past few years so that you don't need to hold UP to change activity settings. In fact, as we know, they've completely removed the menu button shortcut on the latest touch-first devices (Vivoactive 6 and Venu 4).

If a good number of ppl can't be bothered to learn how to open a menu on their watch, it's even less likely that those people would have any interest in 3rd party apps.

On Friday at the end of a race I spoke to some friends and I saw one of them still had the menu on her watch: Resume / Save / Resume later... I told her that she forgot to save it. She said: no, it's always like that, it saves itself after an hour automatically. When I showed her to click the down button and then the start button to save she was shocked.