Complete
over 3 years ago

VVA4-5208

Fixed

Battery drain issues on VA4 (and 4S) using CIQ watch faces since SW 5.10 release

Since the SW 5.10 landed on the Vivoactive 4 (and 4S) in September, people using CIQ faces have noticed that the battery life has gotten considerably worse (battery life being 2 to 4 days shorter than in the previous release, under similar circumstances). The considerable extra battery drain is not appreciated when using a stock watch face.

There have been several posts in the vivoactive 4 section of the forums mentioning about the battery issues with CIQ faces and individual support requests were opened. Unfortunately nothing has progressed. In the vivoactive 4 section of the forums, a Garmin representative has concluded that Garmin can only investigate if the unusual battery drains are coming from a stock face. However, if the drains are coming when using a CIQ face, we should report this situation to the CIQ developers.

This doesn’t make much sense, considering that people have informed multiple times that the battery life with CIQ faces goes back to normal when downgrading the SW to the previous version. Also, as a software engineer, it makes me sad if VA4 users leave bad reviews on CIQ faces because of battery life issues if the problem is not with the CIQ face but with the software version of the watch.

One possible theory for the drain is coming from the SW 5.10 changelog: “Fixed gesture handling for CIQ watch faces”. This is the only item mentioning CIQ faces in SW 5.10 but those changelogs never tell the whole story.

Everybody is aware that CIQ faces will never be as optimized as the native ones. This is more than understood.

If you are a CIQ face developer who has gotten comments regarding battery life on Vivoactive 4 (or 4S) since September, please do vote for this with the hope that the issue will be finally addressed by Garmin. If you have any insights, please comment and share your insights. Also, if you are a VA4 user who has been having battery drains from SW 5.10 onwards, please do vote for this as well.

Adding some posts as a reference:

https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivoactive-4-series/243615/battery-life-issue

https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivoactive-4-series/238197/vivoactive-4-all-versions-sw-5-10

https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivoactive-4-series/244915/beta---vivoactive-4-4s-sw-5-21-is-available

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Parents
  • over 4 years ago

    I did additional research and compared different watch faces to an exact % battery drain per day.  The data I provided in this reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/jtgz5g/vivoactive_4_battery_drain_compared_by_a/ . The testing was performed on a brand new watch, with the very latest firmware: SW 5.10.

    The default garmin's watch face shown significantly less power drain (13%/day) in comparison to any third-party watch faces, which shown stats 25-33% power drain a day. The watch didn't last more than 2-3 days, which is completely unusable.

    As you can notice, a lot of people having the same issues, after the release. Two months ago all the third-party CIQ watch faces were consuming reasonably less battery, prior to SW 5.10 release! The watch faces I was experimenting with having a long credit history, and a big community, so I'm strongly sure it's not a "poor development" or a code-related issues.

Comment
  • over 4 years ago

    I did additional research and compared different watch faces to an exact % battery drain per day.  The data I provided in this reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/jtgz5g/vivoactive_4_battery_drain_compared_by_a/ . The testing was performed on a brand new watch, with the very latest firmware: SW 5.10.

    The default garmin's watch face shown significantly less power drain (13%/day) in comparison to any third-party watch faces, which shown stats 25-33% power drain a day. The watch didn't last more than 2-3 days, which is completely unusable.

    As you can notice, a lot of people having the same issues, after the release. Two months ago all the third-party CIQ watch faces were consuming reasonably less battery, prior to SW 5.10 release! The watch faces I was experimenting with having a long credit history, and a big community, so I'm strongly sure it's not a "poor development" or a code-related issues.

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