Acknowledged
10 days ago
CIQQA-3459

bug: no way to set elevation unit on vivoactive 5

This probably should also be reported in the vivoactive 5 forum, but since that's not monitored by Garmin employees, I'll try here.

A user of one of my apps reported that they can't change the elevation unit from feet to meters. I told them to do it in the system settings (my app uses DeviceSettings.elevationUnits). But it turns out that Garmin left that possibility out from vivoactive 5.

The only settings (both on-watch and via Garmin Connect) are:
distance, weight, height, temperature, pressure.

Note, it's not a mistake, it's height, with cm or inches, and not elevation or altitude that's supposed to be meters or feet.

This is vivoactive 5 with FW version 14.15

Yes, there's no barometer in va5, but it doesn't matter, because the watch displays the correct elevation based on GPS, just in feet.

See also: https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivoactive-5-series/418980/bug-no-way-to-set-elevation-unit-on-vivoactive-5

flocsy🤠
  • 10 days ago

    > Another simple test for a baro is to see if ActivityMonitor has floors.  No baro, no floors as a baro is required for that.

    Hmm both of our solutions have the flaw that they only work since CIQ 2.4.0 (mine) or 2.1.0 (yours). 

    There's only a handful of watches which have CIQ less than 2.4.0, and only one device which has CIQ > 2.1.0 and < 2.4.0 though.

    If one were handling this at compile time and they really cared about figuring out exactly which devices have a baro (under the assumption that elevation units are not available in settings for all the non-baro devices), I guess at least some of hte devices would have to be hardcoded

    --

    > Ok, GC still has the option to not use corrected data

    Yeah I think the option was only removed from the app.

    It's par for the course that the app version of a service often has fewer features than the corresponding website. (These days it's unlikely there's a website at all, for a lot of services/tools newer than ~10 years.)

  • 10 days ago in reply to jim_m_58

    Ok, GC still has the option to not use corrected data

  • 10 days ago in reply to FlowState

    Another simple test for a baro is to see if ActivityMonitor has floors.  No baro, no floors as a baro is required for that.

    If you have an app where elevation shown on the garmin is important, you probably want to have a device without a baro to test on,  I imagine something like a fr23x can be found really cheap if you don't want to buy a va5

  • 10 days ago

    For example, I have Total Ascent and Elevation Change data fields in the store which simply display total ascent (from the API) and total ascent - total descent (both from the API). Even though I tried to make it clear that the data comes from Garmin's API and it's not to be trusted because it's based on GPS elevation, I still get complaints that the data is bad. These are literally my worst-rated apps. So it isn't surprising to me that Garmin chooses to hide all elevation-related data on the device itself, and only shows elevation data in Connect, because Connect is able to correct this data after the fact.

    To be clear, people asked me to make these fields because of the lack of corresponding built-in data fields. And once I made those fields, I got bad reviews because users think the data is bad. And it is, because it's based on GPS elevation.

    So again, it's clear to me why Garmin hides all uncorrected elevation-related data on the device itself, for devices without a baro. And since they do that, it makes sense to me that they would also omit the elevation units setting from the UI.

    I don't think this is a one-off mistake (or new decision for VA5), I think Garmin watches without a baro have been like this for since the beginning (meaning, at whatever point they started breaking out units settings for multiple metrics).

  • 10 days ago

    Elevation from GPS can be way off, based on where you are. Especially when it comes to ascent and descent

    This is why when an activity is synced to GC on a device without a baro, elevation correction is applied by default.  That used to be something you could turn off for an activity, but it seems that option was removed.