Tl;dr: The main break was the swimming pool thing, and that exposed and verified my longstanding perception that Garmin (either) don’t pay enough for good software engineers, and/or don’t listen to them.
I’m writing this because I’m sorry to be leaving. Look back over my posts, it really is true that Garmin changed my life and got me exercising, and I have absolutely loved my Garmin watches (FR645M and Fenix 6). I hope someone in Garmin corporate will think about my niche experience and maybe make some changes to avoid driving customers like me away.
The swimming pool thing: The Fenix 6 can’t set a pool length less than 14m, and I moved into a place with access to a 12m pool. The response on this forum has been ‘Garmin told me the algorithms don’t work for shorter pools’ and ‘how can you possibly do any strokes in less than 14m because I kick off at least 6m’. First, I don’t substantially kick off, I turn around: I’m swimming for exercise, so I get the strokes in. What if I were four feet tall? Second, what algorithms would that be? I use the HRM, and find my strokes, number of lengths and apparently heart rate all correct - just not the distance (for crawl, breaststroke and backstroke). Maybe it’s that SWOLF thing I’m not interested in? Maybe the GPS isn’t always that accurate? It certainly is for me, all the measurements are dead on at least 98% of the time.
But wait, you can adjust the pool length afterwards in Garmin Connect, down to 10m. I’ve dutifully done that after every swim, but nothing cascades! I do ten sets of six lengths, then change the pool length to 12m on the phone. Now my stats literally display a table showing 10 x 84m = 720m. To regularly highlight this failure to me, at the end of every swim I’m congratulated for a new distance record and do I want to accept?
OK, use F3b SwimSports+ instead for logging swims on the watch. The promise of Garmin’s ‘Open API’ was a key point for buying my FR645M — even if I don’t have time to write the app I want, if something is really a problem then someone else will. But no, turns out it’s not -really- open: 3rd party logs (like from F3b) just don’t get into the Garmin ecosystem with Connect in the same way, just like 3rd party watch faces can’t show all the features that the Garmin watch faces do. So, open plus secret APIs, much like Microsoft in the 80s.
Clearly, now I’m sensitized to things that should work better but don’t:
- It seems like part of this reveals some issue that a FIT file can’t be updated after it’s written. Maybe that’s why it appears you have to actively select to measure Heart Rate Recovery after a workout? The watch says it’s checking heart rate all the time, why not two minutes after my workout stopped? Can’t tell, maybe it is logged automatically - but where is HRR in Connect to see?
- Total focus on running - log 989 active minutes in five days swimming and indoor rowing, but the watch still shows ‘no status’ (Ok, maybe this was after a ‘down period’ of no workouts, but pretty sure when I noted that I was doing other activities, just the ‘active minutes’ was over 5 days)
- Must do an activity for stats: ’Low aerobic shortage’ though I’m logging lots of steps, just not as a ‘walk’ activity.
- How about some trend data? I mostly do the same things over and over - the same runs, the same number of lengths in the pool, the same time for indoor rowing, the same walks when I bother to log them. Best I can get is some averages on the Connect web page reports, but really I’d like to see some graphs on the phone that might hopefully show some improvements to work on.
So after 5-ish years I’m giving up, and don’t intend to buy another Garmin product (ever) at this point. I really don’t care about the hardware limitations like the GPS reflections causing subtly different distances depending on which way I’m running - that’s physics. It’s the actively choosing to do the wrong thing (10 x 84 = 720) and ignoring customers who asked to change the pool length setting (I’m the person who bought the $1200 watch after all) that put me off.
Yes, I’m getting an Apple Watch Ultra for Christmas. I’m seriously unenthusiastic about it - it’s ugly, the battery life is still bad, the metrics don’t look good enough, and I’d really prefer not to add another Apple ecosystem thing - but I am fed up with Garmin. The deciding factor was that at least I’ll get all my metrics together on the phone without the holes that Garmin leaves now. As part of my investigations I’ve paid for ‘Athlytic’ and set it up to pull from Garmin data in the iOS database, but the HRV data is missing and lots of other things aren’t there that should be. Garmin customers use Android and iOS phones; here again it’s Garmin’s choice whether to integrate fully with those ecosystems and add value, or close up, do the minimum to fit in, and think their walled garden is more attractive than the other ones.
