How can I disable the launcher icon splash screen from my widget?

Garmin's "Hydration Tracking" widget on Vivoactive 4s seems to suppress this splash screen. Connect IQ Store | Free Watch Faces and Apps | Garmin

Instead of seeing a splash screen, the watch simply freezes until it's able to show the hydration app. So you still experience the hallmark laggy delay of a CIQ widget, but no splashscreen.  Not even a black screen: the previous widget remains visible till about 1/2 second and then the hydration tracker scrolls into view.

I'd argue this is bad UX.  However!  I would still like to know!  How do they suppress the splashscreen?

Understand that the widget loop was replaced by the glance loop for new devices some time back, and devices with the widget loop will rarely, if ever, get new FW.  This to me sounds like a bug in the hydration widget, as "freezing" without any notice isn't that great.  It could be the launcher_icon is simply transparent

It can't be the launcher icon being transparent because I don't see a blank screen while the app loads: the previous widget remains visible.

Also, when I reinstalled it, it initially started showing a splash screen w/non-transparent launcher icon.  I thought I had been grandfathered into an old version of the app, and reinstalling got me onto a new version showing the splash screen. But after connecting to my PC and unplugging, it was back to no splash screen.  Weird.

It could be a FW bug, but even if it is, don't look for a fix.  If your widgets show the splash screen, that's normal on devices with the widget loop.  But you want to add a glance view for devices with a glance loop if you plan to support newer targets..

Here's an intro to that:

https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/b/news-announcements/posts/widget-glances---a-new-way-to-present-your-data

cspotcode said:

I'd argue this is bad UX.  However!  I would still like to know!  How do they suppress the splashscreen?

Yeah, as jim_m_58 said, I doubt this is intentional. I'd lean towards this being a weird edge case and/or a bug, as opposed to the CIQ team using some undocumented/hidden functionality which can only have the effect of making the UX of their widget worse than usual.

The subtext of the OP (from 2018) is that they want to suppress the splash screen and the 2-second delay. It's clearly not good enough to show the previous widget (or a black screen) for 2 seconds.

But clearly the reason the splash screen exists is bc of the 2-second delay, and not the other way around. And the 2-second delay exists bc CIQ widgets take a long time to load. So the implicit premise of the OP is invalid. If the 2-second delay is unavoidable due to CIQ architecture, there's no point in even attempting to suppress the splash screen. I feel like this point was completely missed in the original discussion tbh. It's very unlikely that Garmin decided to put in a splashscreen and 2-second delay -- only for CIQ widgets -- simply to annoy ppl. It's more likely that they put it in there out of necessity. (If a typical CIQ widget takes several seconds to load, they need to display something so the user doesn't think their watch is broken.)

It's just like annoying splash screens for Windows desktop apps. They exist to give the user something to look at while the app loads (fairly slowly), as opposed to existing to make the app take longer to load. (Well, at least historically. If your SSD is fast enough, splash screens might be worse than useless in some cases.)

Obviously glances were introduced for several reasons, but one of the benefits is that CIQ apps don't have to be fully loaded to display their glance view, and the glance view can be loaded very quickly. Def from the user's POV, there's very little difference in the UX between a CIQ glance and a native glance.

A couple corrections, at least based on my observations on a Vivoactive 4s:

Loading a full-fledged App, not a Widget, can happen in a fraction of a second, so widgets could *definitely* load much faster than the firmware-imposed delay.

The delay on a Vivoactive 4s is 1 second, not 2 seconds.

So "the reason the splash screen exists is bc of the 2-second delay, and not the other way around" isn't really true in my case.  The delay is clearly a timer implemented in the firmware: the watch waits a full second before making any attempt to load the widget.

Fair enough. I should’ve clarified that the delay isn’t literally “2 seconds”, I just used that as a (bad) shorthand for “couple of seconds” (which has a different figurative meaning) or “1 or 2 seconds”.

I always assumed that the splash screen was intended to mask slow CIQ widget load times (*). I agree that some CIQ apps load faster than others, and, specifically, some CIQ widgets load faster than others as well. On my old 935, it’s def the case that some widgets load a lot faster than others. but you’re right, the splash screen always seems to be displayed for a certain minimum period of time, so it’s possible there’s a hardcoded delay. Or maybe it has something to do with loading resource icons on demand from slow storage.

If there’s really a hardcoded delay of 1 second, then it’s just another example of terrible design / implementation. Maybe the motivation was something like “if we’re going to display splash screens at all, we’re going to go for a consistent user experience and ensure splash screens are always visible for at least 1 second!”

But I still think that if *all* CIQ widgets could load instantaneously, Garmin wouldn’t have bothered to to implement splash screens. 

EDIT: (*) it’s also possible that your VA4S (released 2020) has faster hardware than my 935 (released 2017), which meant that I would’ve been more likely to assume everything is slow “by default”, whereas you would see no need for widget splash screens.

And it could’ve been that CIQ widget loading times were historically slow, necessitating the splash screens, but maybe newer devices were fast enough to need them.

I guess we’ll never know (unless a CIQ team member has posted about this before), but I would be super curious to know the history and implementation details of the splash screens.

EDIT: they did:

[https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/discussion/1588/iq-splash-screen-is-it-really-necessary/9994#9994]