Vivoactive 3 Touch Screen Issue

I just tried 2 of my apps on a va3 with 5.20FW and things are working fine with onMenu, onBack, and onSwipe. Are you sure it's not something like auto-lock is set to be on during activity?

Thanks for the feedback Jim.

I got what is going on and I am amazed with my findings.

The Garmin team decided to completely disable the touchscreen during SWIMMING activity sessions.

I am pretty sure my users will love to know that.

Swimming with a touch screen seems an "iffy at best" thing, so this strikes me as a bug fix... You can pause and do things, but that means the device is likely out of the water (buttons shouldn't be pressed on most devices when underwater, as it impacts how watertight it is)

Yeah, I think it is for the best, in fact, the vivoactive 3 touchscreen really sucks, I was never able to even take a shower without activating lots of random stuff in the watch (that never happened with the old vivoactive and the vivoactive HR)

I have the vivoactive 3 (and another dozen Garmin watches for testing purposes) but my preferred my day by day watch is still the vivoactive HR.

Cheers.

I have gotten used to simply locking the screen before showering then no probs.

Swimming with a touch screen seems an "iffy at best" thing, so this strikes me as a bug fix... You can pause and do things, but that means the device is likely out of the water (buttons shouldn't be pressed on most devices when underwater, as it impacts how watertight it is)

Haha what?? Where is the heads up to the developers who build apps that rely on consistent behavior? This is really bad - tons of my users are complaining about it currently.

mallon It is actually in the Change log for 5.20, but maybe could use a bit more detail, as the firmware folks typically look at things with the native apps only.:

[h=2]vivoactive 3 firmware version 5.20 is now available[/h] 07-09-2018, 02:44 PM
Firmware version 5.20 is now available and can be downloaded automatically with Garmin Connect Mobile or manually with Garmin Express. This may take up to 24 hours to show as a download.

Change Log 5.20

• Fixed golf activities not recording distance
  
• Added support for abnormal heart rate alerts
  
• Fixed UI changing pages while swimming
  

Hey all,

I didn't see that this was a change. I'll try to talk with the team about finding a way to better communicate things like this when there are changes in device firmware that change CIQ behavior.

Thanks,
- Coleman

Ok thanks - in the meantime I'll release an update to my app to work around this. Is there any way this could have been a native swimming app change instead of a global swimming activity recording change?

First off, I want to apologize for the lack of communication about this change. We had a discussion with the device team today about this, and here's how things shake out:

• Touch screens on our wearables function pretty terribly when wet
  
• The vivoactive HR had its screen disabled in swimming activities for this reason
  
• The vivoactive 3 was also supposed to have its screen disabled in swimming activities, but it wasn't when released; this change fixes the oversight
  
• This should be the generally expected behavior on touch screen devices
  

As it stands, the swimming activities are designed to save the activity and exit when you press the button, and that's all. You could technically circumvent this by using some non-swimming activity type within a connect IQ app, but I know that's not ideal for several reasons.

For those of you with apps that are affected by this change (and setting aside our poor communication on the issue), are things workable as they are now, or is it critical for you to have access to the touch screen inputs?