Installing beta apps is almost impossible now

Apologies, I think you’ve misunderstood me. I haven’t solved anything, like the original poster of this issue I cannot install beta apps to my watch, I can still upload betas to the developer dashboard, but nothing more. It’s wild that this functionality should be removed without replacement.

how did you end up solving it?

I just uploaded a beta app to the dashboard only to find out that downloading from there is no longer a thing. Nothing showing up on iOS either. How frustrating. 

I'm experiencing this as well. Is it possible this is a bug specific to the Android Connect IQ app? It seems that on the iOS version, the download button for pushing the WF installation is located above the app's title bar in the Developer Dashboard. This button is missing in the Android version

> [edit] Maybe you miss the fact that even the old dashboard has been modified so you cannot use it to install apps including beta apps?

No I understood that.

> Depending on your phone setup, the web URL does not always and sometimes never redirects you to the IQ store

Well this is a good point, but it's a general problem with "app links". I agree that for the specific case of installing beta apps, it would be nice to have a dev dashboard in the Connect IQ store phone app. It's funny that Garmin is forcing regular users to use the Connect IQ store phone app by shutting down the website, but they didn't bother to implement crucial CIQ dev functionality in the same app.

However, providing a dev dashboard in the CIQ phone app wouldn't help with the use case of simply sharing an app with an end user via URL. (I realize that's not what this bug report is about, but it's a somewhat related issue that others have raised.) In that case, we still have to assume that using the URL will successfully open the CIQ phone app.

(Ofc, in today's internet culture, people barely know what links are, and instead prefer to search for everything. And in fact, even traditional search is being replaced by chatbots. But my point still stands that other than telling people to search for your app name, the only way to share your app is to use a URL.)

> Some people have to email the link to themselves for it to work as somehow pasting in the browser does not, and some people may not even have the option configured for this to work.

Continuing my point above about how there are some cases where we *need* the URL to at least optionally open the phone app, this might be something where Garmin could improve that user experience (haha gl).

I use an iphone, and I noticed in the past that for some pages that can open either in a website or an app (like Strava activities), there are *two ways* to do so once you've successfully opened the page in a phone browser. One is via a prompt/banner that's rendered by the system and another is via a second banner that's rendered by the website itself. As you pointed out, there are cases where the user may not have the correct setup for the system prompt to be shown (e.g. it may not be shown if you use a browser other than the system browser, such as Safari on iOS). I'm fairly sure this is why sites show that second banner.

As annoying as it might be to see 2 banners asking you to open the current page in an app, it seems to be the accepted way to make sure that users have that option. I did notice that currently, Strava only seems to show the 2nd banner if the system banner isn't shown, so maybe they've improved the UX here. I also noticed that one problem with this 2nd banner is that if it thinks you don't have the latest version of the app (or you don't have the app at all), it will prompt you to update/install the app instead of opening the link in the app. Right now when I open a Strava link in Chrome, the site-provided banner asks me to install the app even though I already have it.

So clearly a site-provided banner isn't the perfect solution either.

Nonetheless, I think there's an expectation that app links need to work *somehow*, given that you're using an app in the first place. 

Btw, at least on iOS, pasting a link into the Notes app is a viable workaround, or sending yourself a message. (I feel like sending yourself an email is the heaviest workaround here, although ofc it's probably the most reliable / universal workaround for this kind of thing.)

(Funny thing is there's also the converse problem, where sometimes you want a link to open in the browser, but the system insists on opening the associated app. In this case you may have to open the link via the long-press context menu instead of just tapping.)

Anyway, like I said, it seems like this was another change that was made without really considering the UX or functionality implications. For example, aside from this dev dashboard/beta stuff, it seems like this change will prevent new apps from being searchable via google. Maybe they don't care about google search anymore (see above).

It's funny that the Google Play store and iOS app store still have robust web presences. I don't think you can install apps *directly* from the store sites, but at least all the apps are still listed and searchable on the web.