Fenix 5 Plus Series - 8.21 Beta Release

Yet here I am, and many others, with perfectly functioning devices.

Complaining that beta fw's have bugs is like complaining daylight is too bright. You are aware that by testing them, we agree to help find them. 

Read his last sentence more carefully. He is complaining that non-betas are released with errors in them.

And he is perfectly right. I have said this before: Garmin seems to have a habit of introducing new functionality and new errors in their stable versions, and then correcting the errors in their betas. So they end up with betas being more stable than their stable versions.

If the betas are more stable than the public releases, then their betas must be quite good.

I’ve been running all the public releases since 2.xx-something, and I’ve never had any crashes or bugs that prevents normal use as claimed by maxmekker.

I’m not saying that the bugs people are reporting aren’t real, but there’s a big difference between bugs in certain features and the watch being useless in total.

Critisism along the lines of maxmekker’s tends to be quite exaggerated in my opinion.

Remember, a bug is only a bug if it appears in an area that you use.  If you don't use the area, it's not a bug.  Hence, the necessity of releasing beta's, to attempt to discover all of the bugs in a release, not just the one's in the "core" operations.  Someone doing intervals on a rowing machine using only their left hand may encounter a bug that others won't.. :-)

this is the battery data field I use. 

I've had a few bugs hit me in the beta, but none that rendered he watch useless. If it was that much of an issue, I roll back.

Maybe you have to use other brands to appreciate the work here. And when I say USE I mean all the functions in as many as possible sports. As a suunto and polar user too, I can say with confidence that there is no other device with the depth of metrics and features that the Fenix has. Even cheap forerunners have more than other premium devices. Suunto releases one or two updates per year leaving you with annoying bugs for over 1 or 2 years. The suunto 9 has bugs and inconvenient usage that Spartan series of 2016 have too. On the other hand I reported the last sport widget bug to the beta and team and after a couple of days a beta firmware came up. 

One example - which pissed me off a lot on behalf of others, because of the way it was handled:
The random 5-6 digit power spikes with power meters appeared for the first time in a stable version, 6.00 I think. That was a big deal to those of us who where hit by the bug, because it also messed with our averages. 
This bug was then fixed in a subsequent beta - which added no new errors, so that beta was actually better than the stable version.
It then took most of half a year before the fix was released in a new stable version. For all that time, those who could not install betas (APAC users!), were left hanging, with a stable version with power meter errors.

Since then I have paid more attention to this and noticed that new changes are often introduced by Garmin for the very first time in a stable version, with no previous testing in a beta version.

This is not how things are supposed to work in my opinion. New features - and the bugs caused by those features - should be introduced in a beta version, where those of use who are willing to live with it, can test them. When those features are then considered stable, they can be released in a new stable version.

I agree that the watches are not unusable because of all this. But that was not what I responded to either. I responded specifically to the comment about having to run betas to get stable firmware, which I agree has a lot of truth to it.

I remember this bug, your are 100% right.