Firmware 4.00 Release

4.20 has now been fully released.

What a mess and unprofessional software development/management at Garmin - really the worst i ever experienced!
That funny "20%" guinea pig method is a testimony for "ahmm... we don't exactly know what we are doing, so let's only infect 20% of our customers with the new firmware-experiment so that we don't have to exchange 100% of the delivered watches".

That is pretty much standard for software development these days. Take Microsoft for instance. They push Win10 versions to various update groups (early adopters, etc) and gather info on the stability of the install process & update before they expand the push.

While it might seem like a situation of "we don't exactly know..." as you said, the truth is that there are only so many test cases you can replicate in an automated lab environment and it is wise to be cautious about the push from the lab to real world. It is also wise to gather feedback from the early adopters before you push broadly. This is especially true of any platform that hosts apps. The CIQ apps are powerful and can do all sorts of things. Garmin simply can't test the interaction between their firmware and every single app. Much the same way that MS states that Win10 offers broad app compatibility, but even then some large software vendors have to do remediation when a version upgrade hits.

Garmin clearly found a bug in the real world that wasn't experienced in the QA cycle and they did the right thing. They halted the roll out, fixed the bug, and pushed a new firmware out quickly. You have to give them credit for responding quickly here. I'm sure people on the forum would like updates more quickly and more communication about the delay, but the process worked as it should this time around and in the end we all ended up with a fixed 4.2 rather than a 4.0 with a critical bug.

Updated to 4.2.
Swimming tonight, let's see if it works!

It's listed in the 4.2 changelog:

• Made improvements to pool swim distance accuracy.
  

Seems it was broken in 4, possibly one of the reasons the roll out stopped.

Updated to 4.2.
Swimming tonight, let's see if it works!

Let me know how it goes. I'm hesitant to update if this is still buggered :) I have a HRM-Swim coming so want to make sure all the data remains meaningful :)

So should mine have updated if rollout is complete? As it hasn't. Guess I need to look through garmin express?

Let me know how it goes. I'm hesitant to update if this is still buggered :) I have a HRM-Swim coming so want to make sure all the data remains meaningful :)

Don't upgrade to 4.2 for swimming, it's broken.
Sporadic and innacurate distance and lap count on the display.
Session was showing 200m + jumps during recording.
After sync to Garmin connect the summary on the watch updated to match Connect, which looks correct.
Useless while actually in the pool.

Don't upgrade to 4.2 for swimming, it's broken.
Sporadic and innacurate distance and lap count on the display.
Session was showing 200m + jumps during recording.
After sync to Garmin connect the summary on the watch updated to match Connect, which looks correct.
Useless while actually in the pool.

Thanks for letting me know! At this point, there really isn't a benefit for me to upgrade over 3.10. Everything I do with the watch currently works.

As posted on another thread it would appear that battery life is significantly worse in smart watch mode than 3.10