Devs at GARMIN, do you test software before releasing it?

NicK said:

Now let me understand better if you are defending Garmin's mistakes or you are blaming the customers who return it when they are not happy with the product.

Who's defending Garmin's mistakes?

- Me, the guy who has posted all about endless Garmin bugs over the years

- You, who says that Garmin customers should buy a Garmin (which will have perfect firmware out of the box) and never update it. You also said that people shouldn't buy a product from a Garmin competitor

NicK said:

If I went to buy a new Fenix today I would find the firmware that Garmin deemed most stable at that moment (I'm not sure and I don't particularly care, but I think they perform evaluations on the firmware to be installed on new batches of watches).

You're not sure and you don't care precisely how Garmin allegedly ensures that a new device has perfect firmware, but you previously said it's impossible to buy a Garmin which has bad firmware.

I can assure you it's possible because I bought a 935 at release (for example) and it had a ton of bugs. I spent my own time doing unpaid QA work for Garmin so some of them could get fixed.

Also, you realize that it's possible that any given firmware has bugs that Garmin doesn't know about, right? Otherwise there would be no need for customers to report bugs or for Garmin to release betas.

EDIT: thanks for the downvote. Enjoy your bugs and terrible user experience. Nothing can ever be improved, and you're a bad person if you think otherwise.

Well the problem is that we are beta testers even without joining beta programs

I also said that it is better not to install third-party apps and to completely uninstall Connect IQ because as soon as you install third-party apps the watches start to have strange anomalies.

flowstate said:

you previously said it's impossible to buy a Garmin which has bad firmware.

For the rest you were imprecise and you didn't understand what I wrote this time either, but I'll explain it to you for the last time:

I recommended not joining the beta program if you want to have a problem-free device.

Furthermore, I said that it is not acceptable for an official fw to be as unstable as a BETA version and therefore it is better to ask for a replacement under warranty. This law applies if you buy the Garmin with defective software or if an official firmware is defective.

flowstate said:

EDIT: thanks for the downvote. Enjoy your bugs and terrible user experience. Nothing can ever be improved, and you're a bad person if you think otherwise.

Are you a developer and don't know how to see who gives you a negative vote?

NicK said:

Are you a developer and don't know how to see who gives you a negative vote?

I was talking to gaijin in my edit, not you. Is there anything in my edit which suggested I was talking to you? (Yes, I’m aware they upvoted another comment of mine. I can’t read minds to determine the exact reason for the upvote or downvote ofc.)

NicK said:

For the rest you were imprecise and you didn't understand what I wrote this time either

I understood what you wrote each time. To paraphrase:

When you buy a Garmin, the firmware (and device) will be free from defects. If you allow the firmware to be updated, then as the result of your decision, your device will no longer work well.

Obviously you are blaming Garmin for releasing bad firmware, but it’s not hard to see how you are also blaming the customer here. It’s normal for all consumer devices and apps to accept automatic updates by default. As a power user I like to manage updates manually in some cases, but I would never blame a regular user for not wanting to do that.

You also advised against voting with our dollars and choosing a competitor to Garmin (for some reason.) (Not that the market is granular enough for voting with our dollars to be an effective way to get exactly what we want)

Maybe you don’t understand what I’m saying: this is an absurd situation and terrible advice to give to end users. Instead of refusing to accept updates from Garmin, users should demand better QA and UX from Garmin.

And again, you said more than once that it’s impossible to get bad firmware out of the box — this is a core part of your argument. My personal experience contradicts that. You can just browse the 935 forums around the time of release to see all the bugs that existed on day one. More recently, I bought a 955 well after release and it still had some bugs that had been reported around release time.

If your foundational assumption that “Garmins are good out of the box and only out of the box” is faulty, then the rest of your argument is irrelevant. Even if 100% of users took your advice, it wouldn’t be enough to avoid bugs. Perhaps it would spur Garmin to some kind of action when they noticed that nobody updates their device, but it’s unlikely that enough people would do this anyway. As we can all agree, most people don’t read the official Garmin forums, the Garmin subreddit or any Garmin discussion communities online. As others would point out, the majority of Garmin users are probably happy, regardless of bugs. Or at least they’re not unhappy enough to complain online or return their product. I know plenty of people who expect all tech to suck and they just live with it. What else can they do? Except disable updates, which most people are not willing to do.

As far as practical solutions go, I think the only thing that can help us today is for an influencer like DCR to post about Garmin quality issues, like he did years ago. Obviously it’s not perceived to be bad enough yet for that to happen.

To be absolutely clear, if I thought that the only way to have a stable Garmin device would be to disable updates forever, I wouldn’t suggest buying one at all. I’m speaking from the POV of a runner who uses a Garmin Forerunner watch and likes it, despite all of my complaints. I can see that for the past 9 years, more than a few new or casual runners have been perfectly happy with an Apple Watch, which is objectively a better smartwatch and has a better user experience. (Yes, I know that apple intentionally hobbles the functionality of non-apple smartwatches when used with iphone.)

I can also see that Garmin has been trying to catch up with Apple Watch for years (although we all know they can’t and won’t be able to achieve the same level of success). If they’re not careful, they might become irrelevant. 

The only reason I like Garmin watches is bc of certain key differences compared to Apple Watch. I absolutely realize that many people wouldn’t care about the same stuff that I do (like having a 5-button interface), especially if they were never exposed to it in the past. Notice that none of the Garmin “lifestyle” watches have 5 buttons. Notice how Garmin’s Venu Sq very strongly resembles a certain apple product. If you don’t look closely, you might not realize it’s a Garmin.

I would also argue that no runner really needs anything more than a timex (lots of elites would agree, and some would say a timex is superior), so if you’re going to wear a smartwatch, why not wear the popular one which has great UX and gives you social status (hint: not Garmin)? I know casual runners who happily switched from Garmin to Apple. There will always be more casual people in any given mainstream hobby than “hardcore” ppl.

flowstate said:

“Garmins are good out of the box and only out of the box” is faulty

Also for the F7, took over a year until you could use IQ widgets during activity recording, something that worked fine with the F5/6. There was also that strange sunset time issue.

That was my incentive to join the beta program to check on that. Another reason is to catch bugs for functions that are important to you personally early while they still might get fixed, this gets much more unlikely as soon as those bugs are in a release version.

Currently, it is better to buy an old (Fenix ​​5x, 6) Garmin than a new one. The software of old models is more refined. New models have a lot of problems that every new user will experience sooner or later

KrapfenKringel said:

Also for the F7, took over a year until you could use IQ widgets during activity recording, something that worked fine with the F5/6

Yep, the number of regression bugs in Garmin devices indicates insufficient testing and/or foresight imo. There's another regression with widgets where GPS will turn off when you open (or scroll past?) a CIQ widget in modern devices while you're recording an activity - maybe it's been fixed now, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Yeah, I get that the root cause of the problem is that widgets are now just like apps ("super apps"), but it's funny how nobody is surprised that basic stuff broke when Garmin redesigned widgets.

I've worked in an "old school" embedded devices company (kinda like Garmin) and a modern startup. At the old school company, I lost count of the number of times I could predict bugs ahead of time (sometimes *years* in advance), or the problems I would find after casually looking at the code for some other feature that wasn't really my responsibility. If the customer did not complain, managers just didn't care, especially if it was a usability issue and not a clear-cut bug.

Modern startups aren't perfect, but they do have better testing and code review regimes than some places with an older culture. (I'm not suggesting Garmin doesn't have modern testing and code review practices tho. Even if they do, clearly it isn't working 100%.)

There's no reason to buy an outdated tech such as Fenix 5 or 6, especially in 2024 - if you're scared of bugs get the base Fenix 7 and never update, simple as that.