[GENERAL] Wishes/ideas for Connect IQ future

Hello Travis, thanks for your response, your posts on this forum are extremely helpful. The biggest problem is probably that issue transfer to other teams.. That is good, but sometime it seems like the bug is just lost during this process as we are keep receiving info that somebody is working on it while months are passing and no progress is done. I would rather get info, that it is not priority now, than to have this false expectations. Good example is this: https://forums.garmin.com/forum/developers/connect-iq/1416363-garmin-connect-web-draw-only-2-from-3-iq-generated-workout-graphs I literally stopped development on some apps to wait until the bug is fixed, hoping I will just continue with my original plans after that. But it seems, that wasn't good move. 

BUT, with the new community portal I am confident it will be better! I can't thank enough for this change!

BTW, what is general status of Android SDK? Are there still some people who are able to maintain it? 

Anyway, enjoy the Summit!

My saddest topics from the post is history! Well done and thank you for new community portal! Can't wait for other news from summit.

I wish we could have said something earlier, but it would have ruined the surprise! I'm sure there will be some adjustment as people learn their way around this new platform and we make adjustments to get things working the way we'd like, but hopefully this is at least some demonstration that we're committed to growing Connect IQ and supporting the developer community.

( silently joins the crowd )

Oh, you!

Hello CIQ team! Congratulation for CIQ 3.1, which I believe now leaves its beta phase considering new announcement! I am sad, that popular Fenix 5 range will not get new CIQ features, but I can understand business decision or technical reasons behind this.

What I DO NOT understand is what I can expect from the CIQ platform next. And if the plans for next CIQ version are not clear even for you, let me please help you with these suggestions:

- please stop for a while on bringing new stuff and look on current features, their usability and how they can be polished (for example mapping).

- go through whole documentation and update it finally. Same parts are obsolete, other misleading etc. Also, it’s great to announce new features, but how does it look when announcement refers to documentation where new classes and methods are not to be found? I don't think you are aware by how much current quality of documentation decrease number of devs who actually finish some more complex ideas on your platform...

- new forum is vast improvements over old one, but the issues starting to appear even here. Threads with more structured posts are extremely hard to follow due to weird sorting by newest posts so the only option is often to click to link in email notification...

- Stop reacting to those few bug reports by messages claiming only that you have some tickets for it. We don't care whether you have some internal ticket for it or not, we want to get understanding whether it is priority for you to fix it or not and when it might happen, so we will be able to adjust our development plans accordingly. There are lots of unreported bugs as consequence - because why should developers care to spend a time to issue report with usual local feedback to them... We want to primarily finish our projects, either hobby or commercial. I understand there will be always lots of bugs on such platform – but that’s what priorities are for – and you don’t seem to handle them properly not only by my opinion.

- Create solid plan which issues (both technical and non-technical) and when you are willing/able to fix and PLEASE share us at least some from it to not have false hopes during development of apps on your platform. Current situation of the platform for building anything little more  complex is not great, but I wonder why it is getting still worse and not in opposite direction as I closely watch the situation for more than year now.  

- And please, if you can, share with us the aspects which drives your overall priorities to understand the situation better.

I am not really happy to act as probably biggest hater on this forum currently, but I still hopes my posts can help you realise some of these problems and motivate you to find a way how to deal with them or at least let us know what we can expect.

It’s not hard to be surprised by my attitude - after few months of work, together with my client (and lots of invested money on both sides) we were able to bring CIQ integration of the offline navigation phone app with hundreds of thousands active users only to throw project to the trash after one more month, because Garmin "accidentally" blocked some usage of CIQ modules during prime season and affected thousands of Connect IQ users in the process. But even now based on your latest posts you don't have any clue when or if it will be fixed. That is not messing with devs only, but your customers too. Honestly, I wish we at least argued if we should expect that and whose mistake this is, but no, all we currently know is that there is some bloody ticket for it and nothing more.

Consider this as open letter for you guys. I offered some dialog before, but no luck with proper response from you guys both via mails or forum. I might be only unimportant developer, but why I have feeling that you are failing to deliver promises even to your bigger partners? So yeah, this is not about particular bugs.

What other developers outside of my social bubble thinks?  

Travis.ConnectIQ Brandon.ConnectIQ 

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers

>What other developers outside of my social bubble thinks?  

i agree - there is a lack of communication from inside Garmin to the outside, it seems maybe even a lack of communication between groups within Garmin. it isn't really acceptable to have a Connect app update that breaks something, then have the only official comments being akin to "we don't know when we'll fix it", and requiring users downgrade an apk from a third part site. If you are going to break things and not be able to fix them right away, you should communicate very clearly AND also provide an official reversion method.

Hi everybody. Yes, on Garmin you need to have some online tracking in your app and log all web response errors and exceptions, and which device was affected. And you should look on it pretty regularly. It's happening that some firmware is released and there are errors on one specific device. It happened with Edge Explore, with Fenix 5 devices or others. You can report this bug to Garmin and it's usually fixed pretty quickly. But I would wish it was not happening at all...

I usually display a warning message in the app "You should upgrade your Garmin firmware to XY", if the fix is already released. Or I temporarily disable the device. Sometimes it's hard, because for example the Edge 1000 shares a device ID with Edge Explore 1000, but the firmware numbers are completely different. For CIQ it's the same device, but it is not for users.

For example the last Oregon issue was pretty bad. The problem that all CIQ storage and properties were removed when the device was turned off was fixed about a year ago. Then it got into firmware again in February. The same error was introduced into Gpsmap 66, but it was fixed pretty quickly. But it took several months to fix it on the Oregon. And this problem still persists on Garmin Rino :) Really, I wish the teams were connected better and big problems like this were handled more quickly.

Some errors are really not the fault of developers. For example the bluetooth error -2 from makeWebRequest. It happens on some devices when the bluetooth looks connected, but seems to be stuck for CIQ. Even when you turn off and turn on the app, it does not reconnect. And you can see in the Strava, Komoot and other app comments that users complain about that. These apps have less than 3* ratings mostly because of issues like this.

Really thank you for the ERA tool in the new 3.1 SDK! It is really helpful and it shows all the important information, when there was an exception, when the code executed too long, or failed on out of memory exception. This is really a must have and the best tool. Yes, it's very simple. And when an update is released, all the exceptions are removed  :) But at least it's something.

I would say I really wish the Garmin development was "easier"... Currently it is not the platform where you can easily and quickly iterate and try new things. For example, if you want to download some data from the data field, there are still no good samples or articles. The limitations are not documented, how much data you can receive, what is the maximum URL length, how to download a "byte array" or how to do it efficiently. Even how to get the exception from the background task or some meaningful debug output is not straightforward.

And the tools are still bad. Yes, at least the simulator does not freeze now, when you do a lot of System.println calls, and does not loose settings and OAUTH tokens after every start in the SDK 3.1, thank you! But the debug still does not work. Maybe the first breakpoint is hit, but then the whole Eclipse gets stuck, the simulator is broken and you need to restart the whole IDE. I have never met a Garmin developer that would say "yes, the debug is working fine for me".

There is no way to do an "exception driven programming" - just hit the F5, see where it fails, fix the line, hit F5 again... Come on, the Error: System Error or Details: Failed invoking <symbol> is not what you want to see. You mostly don't even get the stacktrace in the console. There is no way to know where it failed. You need to compile it as a debug, copy both files to the device, do the task again and look into the CIQ_LOG file.

It would be so awesome to be able to just deploy and debug on the device, like on any other platform :) You remember the feedback on the Summit, the "yes please" from the crowd was really loud.

But I know that it takes time. I love this platform and the community. There are some challenges, but it is getting definitely better. Thank you for the support and all the communication with us.

Hey Everyone,

I've been looking through some of the feedback you've been providing and I'll to say first of all how much we appreciate it! We love hearing the good and the bad and will continue to try and make the entire CIQ ecosystem better. I'd like to take some time now and address what I can as clearly as I can. My hope is to clear up any confusion where that may be the case and be honest where we just don't have or can't give any direction on. If I've missed something you've asked about or commented on, then I probably can't say anything more about it or I've tried to answer it somewhere else in my responses. I'm breaking things down as the OP did into Features, General/Platform, and Non-CIQ (yet related) issues:

Features:

Datafields - We have already discussed giving datfields the ability to talk to each other and it's on the road-map. However, this is far enough down the road-map that I'm not sure which SDK it will be in and don't have the ability to give any real indication or timeline right now.

Regarding faster access to background processes, we don't have any immediate plans to do this, however, we do have a feature request made. At the time this was requested, this was not feasible. I'm asking the team to take another look on our newer generations of devices, but can't make any promises here.

Apps - We have requested resuming of activities, remote launch without a confirmation dialog, and a request to look at what running native datafields and/or CIQ datafields in CIQ Apps would look like. My inclination is that the last item here is the least likely to happen, but I've asked to discuss this idea.

General/Platform:

We are currently working together internally and with device teams to address some of our longer standing bugs. I really can't communicate much around the road-map for CIQ outside of what's already been communicated. I can say that we understand that there have been some delays in the timeline that we had certainly not hoped for.

I'm sad to hear that some of our outstanding bugs have caused some of our devs to feel that it's not worth reporting things that seem "smaller". Know that we take all of them and they're all prioritized. Along with our forum upgrade, we've not worked out some new processes to attempt to make sure that we are better communicating the status of tickets. We will not be able to provide an external facing bug tracking system. However, I think the biggest benefit to having one is the visibility and communication. The QA and Engineering teams are working on better communication standards and processes to mitigate some of the issues we've had with communicating status of issues in the past.

Regarding what we can communicate in bug ticket statuses, we will communicate whatever we can. If we can provide an internal priority, software version number for device, GCM, SDK, etc...then we will. There are sometimes where we are unable to communicate those things because we don't have them yet. Other times we can't because it would divulge information that we can't release yet. And yet other times, it might be unintentionally misleading to the developer community and cause confusion to give version numbers before they are released. In all that, we will give everything that we can. This should be happening at least weekly.

We are working to prioritize documentation and better debugging. Right now, we are working on the stability of the 3.0 and upcoming 3.1 SDKs. This includes addressing some of the longer standing issues in order to support these new SDKs.

Non-CIQ/Related:

We have recently made some changes in the forums to help address some of the "low-hanging fruit" issues. Some of the changes that have been requested have wider affect than the CIQ community so they required getting the okay from the other forum teams to implement. The biggest change we've made is that we have "flattened" the forum replies structure. We do not have pagination at this point, but have word from the platform team that this feature is coming. We haven't been given a timeline for that update.

For blog information, we have moved to using the blog topics found here for major items: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/developer/ and the Blogs found at the top of the CIQ Developer Community here: https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/b/news-announcements 

We do not have plans to continue using the blog found here: https://developer.garmin.com/blog/category/connect-iq-sdk/

We are actively working with our Product Support team to help them better understand and troubleshoot CIQ related issues. The first evidences of this are the CIQ specific sections that have been added to the support website. We are still working with support to update what is there and developer new content that is helpful and makes sense to our end users.

Finally, there is an unfortunate nature of large, multi-team, projects that makes them tend to move slower than we would all like. Know that we, along with our work toward better processes for communication externally, are trying to find ways to speed things up internally for you as well. Because of the complexity of Connect IQ, the fact that so many different product have to do work to integrate our changes into device firmware, and the ever constant difficulty of that multi-team priority setting, this is probably always going to be something we fight. However, we are always fighting it better. This is particularly true as we ramp up on our newer products (with exception of course). Where this will continue to be difficult is on our older products as the focus keeps looking forward.

Conclusion:

I know this was a bit of a book, but I wanted to do my best to provide you all with everything I can because, frankly, you all make Connect IQ what it is! We think our developers are the best developers. They're certainly the most active! We want to do everything we can to help you be successful and in turn you make us and our platform better.

Thank you all again for all that you do, your patience, and your passion for Connect IQ! I know you wouldn't have spoken up if you didn't care about it.

-Coleman