Latest Garmin app update ruined my home page

2529455 said:

I'd say very few customers even know what ConnectIQ is

Couldn’t agree more

2529455 said:

but its absolutely critical for Garmin's future strategy with LTE. We'll hopefully see the likes of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp messaging come to the watch, and these will all be built upon ConnectIQ.

If the UX of the spotify CIQ app is any indication, these apps will be terrible if and when they come to Garmin. inb4 “wow you’re a dev and you don’t know how to use spotify????” For the record spotify is great on apple watch, iphone and even desktop (Windows and Mac), but coincidentally enough, the worst user experience to be found is on the Garmin platform. inb4 “but why doesn’t anyone else complain???” - bc imo everyone is used to mediocrity in tech, so they don’t bother to complain and/or they blame themselves when stuff goes wrong. And everyone is used to a certain level of quality with Garmin stuff, which is why so many runners don’t even bother to open Connect if they can avoid it.

I know I often type too much, but I’ll just say that in the CIQ Spotify app, you literally cannot select an individual song to play from a playlist (there’s a ton of other issues I won’t go into). Why Garmin users will accept this kind of thing is a mystery to me. (Or maybe it isn’t, since I still use Garmin.)

2529455 said:

In my area of business we "cull" legacy cruft quite a frequently which upsets a tiny minority of customers, but it's essential in order to reduce the operational overhead which frees engineers up to work on new product.

I understand this point completely, but one person’s “legacy cruft” is another person’s nearly irreplaceable complex and useful set of features.

I’ve seen a startup promise to revolutionize a whole industry with their complex flagship product, convincing a VIP customer to sign a multi year support contract, only to sunset the product a couple years later. The company really wants the customer to stop using the product (now in “legacy” support status) and move over to their much cheaper and simpler new product, but it’s not gonna happen any time soon.

I realize it’s very different here as Garmin hasn’t promised its users anything, and for other obvious reasons.

I also realize that no one can force a company to continue to support a product or service, in general.

But I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the corporate/managerial POV when I see stuff like the above, especially when it’s accompanied by layoffs (in some cases, during periods of record profits). (Obviously I’m too idealistic/softheaded to be a manager.)

Terrible update.  Change is difficult for many of us senior/masters age group athletes.  I never was able to get the watch face I wanted, now my iPhone does not tell me the data either.  3 years of data is essentially gone.  Time to switch brands.  Garmin Vivoactive 4 with Apple 12s iPhone.    

I don't want anything that's on the new home page and the things that I used on the old home page are no longer there and cannot be put there. Is this the most pointless and annoying update ever?

flowstate said:

inb4 “wow you’re a dev and you don’t know how to use spotify????”

You won't get any push back from me on that. The UI is intentionally simple due to its button focussed origins. This will likely evolve as touch screens become ubiquitous on all models.

flowstate said:

I know I often type too much, but I’ll just say that in the CIQ Spotify app, you literally cannot select an individual song to play from a playlist (there’s a ton of other issues I won’t go into).

Yup that's a limitation of the media player that devs are required to use. Should be simple to fix, but I'm assuming Garmin devs are stretched pretty thin and it's a low priority task. Still, the customer doesn't care about that when they're spending $1k on a watch. You just want the same features found on the competitors $1k watch and you'll ask questions when it's not there.

flowstate said:

I understand this point completely, but one person’s “legacy cruft” is another person’s nearly irreplaceable complex and useful set of features.

Yep, but publically traded companies have a shareholder obligation to continuously grow. For that you need engineers working on new product and that becomes difficult if you're putting 80% of your team on operational maintenance of old platforms. It makes even less sense if only a tiny subset of customers are using those features because your engineering cost can sometimes outweigh the value (revenue streams) that the old feature is bringing in.

flowstate said:

But I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the corporate/managerial POV when I see stuff like the above, especially when it’s accompanied by layoffs (in some cases, during periods of record profits). (Obviously I’m too idealistic/softheaded to be a manager.)

It's about as much fun as talking about politics (ie best avoided), but it's a fundamental driver of why beloved things suddenly disappear in tech.

flowstate said:

I just don't get why Spotify hasn't been bombarded with 1-star reviews and complaints over such a basic limitation. Except I do: the bar is low and ppl often don't care when things don't work or they blame themselves

Pretty much. My sentiment was "ah that sucks, oh well.. it's just a sport watch so I guess we're lucky to even have minimal viable functionality".

Garmin will need to step up as the Apple Watch Ultra starts to eek out better battery life and eventually full onboard mapping with full routing.

The trouble is that Garmin already has a major gaps like the lack of LTE. Once they have that, there's going to be the gap around messaging (replying to insta/FB/iMessage/WhatsApp from the watch without the phone).

Rapidly growing out CIQ Toolbox, VMs and maybe even the hardware at the same time as delivering useful LTE functionality is a massive undertaking.

Apple look like they have a lot less work to do in order to bridge the gap in functionality if you take battery life out of the equation.

flowstate said:

For sure one of my complaints is that the Spotify / music player UI in 5-button touchscreen models doesn't take full advantage of the touchscreen. Every on-screen control in the player is accessible via physical button -- there are no convenient touch-only controls for users who want them. I absolutely realize this is bc touch can be disabled in 5 button watches, but I think this approach is misguided. If touch is enabled, the UX should be enhanced. Instead they (Garmin) opted to cripple the touch experience here in order to accomodate button usage.

If you look at the Apple forums, people are complaining about the inverse. The slightest bit of rain, wet hands or a wet jacket causes the watch to do all sorts of funky things due to prioritising touch as the main form of input. Personally I prefer prioritising buttons due the inclement weather I'm often in (plus I'm faster with buttons), but I think I'm in the minority here. Most normies want to see a thing and poke it with a finger.

flowstate said:

I'd like to see a hybrid approach where ofc all functionality is accessible by buttons (in the same clunky UI with two pages that we see today), but the main UI has most or all of the functionality available by touch

That'd be great!

These are all pretty hard issues to solve from the point forward, and it's made even harder when a behemoth like Apple has decided it wants to gobble up your niche of the market.

2529455 said:

The trouble is that Garmin already has a major gaps like the lack of LTE. Once they have that, there's going to be the gap around messaging (replying to insta/FB/iMessage/WhatsApp from the watch without the phone).

They just added Garmin Messenger functionality to current Forerunner (and I assume Fenix/Epix) watches.

It's some proprietary service which works via SMS (and maybe email). I haven't tried it, but I assume that Garmin will send and receive msgs on your behalf so that the recipients don't need to have Garmin Messenger installed (I hope).

I noticed Garmin also added a T9 keyboard to touchscreen watches a while back which is a lot better than the rotary menu keyboard, when using touch.

EDIT: sorry, numpad keyboard minus predictive text

However, a qwerty (like built-in apple watch keyboard) or handwriting recognition keyboard (like some apple watch apps) would be even better. This goes into territory where AMOLED is clearly superior (the higher resolution would be better for displaying a keyboard with tiny keys and tiny autocomplete choices.)

2529455 said:

FlowState said:

For sure one of my complaints is that the Spotify / music player UI in 5-button touchscreen models doesn't take full advantage of the touchscreen. Every on-screen control in the player is accessible via physical button -- there are no convenient touch-only controls for users who want them. I absolutely realize this is bc touch can be disabled in 5 button watches, but I think this approach is misguided. If touch is enabled, the UX should be enhanced. Instead they (Garmin) opted to cripple the touch experience here in order to accomodate button usage.

If you look at the Apple forums, people are complaining about the inverse. The slightest bit of rain, wet hands or a wet jacket causes the watch to do all sorts of funky things due to prioritising touch as the main form of input. Personally I prefer prioritising buttons due the inclement weather I'm often in (plus I'm faster with buttons), but I think I'm in the minority here. Most normies want to see a thing and poke it with a finger.

Amen brother. That's why I bought a 5-button touchscreen watch in the first place (as opposed to watch with mandatory touch) - because I can disable touch for road races and hard running workouts when I don't want stray touches to mess things up. I owned a 630 back in the day and I def had problems when rain or a long sleeve triggered stray touches. I've seen the same complaints on every generation of Garmin watches which has "mandatory touch" (e.g. Vivoactive and Venu).

But yeah we are def in the minority. We'd have to explain to normies why buttons are better in some use cases ("I can do stuff without looking" and "rain doesn't f up my running activity")

This is also why I don't think Apple Watch can replace Garmin for me (yet.) I just need to be able to pause/resume and lap an activity without looking, but that isn't really possible with Apple Watch, not even with the Ultra's action button. (Even with the action button, one of the two actions I need is still a weird gesture like "double tap screen" or "press two buttons at once".) It's kind of funny that recently or in the future, Apple has/will add a new button to its smartwatches and phones, which kind of reverses the trend where ppl claimed that physical buttons suck and touch is superior for *everything*. (See also: the touchscreen vs physical dashboard controls debate for cars.)

But I don't mind touch being enabled for maps, and it think it would be great for the music player too (if the player had any controls that could benefit from touch, which it doesn't on 5-button watches). Stray touches are also far less of a big deal on 5-button watches since they can't trigger important actions such as pause/resume or lap activity. (Then again ppl have complained that their data fields change on their own, since those are editable via touch now.)

Notice that Garmin intentionally disabled touch functionality on the pause screen for Forerunner/Fenix watches, bc they know ppl hate it when your activity accidentally gets saved or discarded. In true Garmin fashion:

- this restriction is mysteriously not extended to the actual discard confirmation prompt. So you could select Discard by accident with the button, and a long sleeve or rain could accidentally confirm it

- garmin chooses to display the "sorry touch is disabled for this screen" message every single time you accidentally touch the screen and there's no way to disable it. you'd think they could just show a "no touch" icon or emojis in the corner instead of replacing/blocking the whole screen. e.g. 

I think Garmin really needs to eat their own dogfood so they can identify stuff that's annoying to users.

2529455 said:

These are all pretty hard issues to solve from the point forward, and it's made even harder when a behemoth like Apple has decided it wants to gobble up your niche of the market.

Yeah for sure. I realize complaining is easy and solving problems is hard haha. But I think the first step is to acknowledge that problems exist. Yes, at some point it's useless whining tho. I'm sure if I could actually work on the CIQ Spotify app, I'd find that some of the problems are not so easy to solve, or that I wouldn't be permitted to address them the way I want or at all. Something tells me that either:

- Garmin themselves worked on the app

or

- Someone other than the main product team at Spotify worked on it

or

- Spotify doesn't care too much about the UX of the CIQ app (and/or they can't be bothered to push the limits of CIQ or work around any restrictions.)

However here's my first cut at solving the "slow playlist scrolling" issue. Obviously the problem is that the album art takes a long time to load so they don't load it all at once.

My solution:
- load the whole list of playlists -- minus album art -- at once (this is just text, it can't be that big). if it can't be loaded all at once, load as much as is reasonably possible (I'm sure more than 3 items can be loaded at once), and load the rest in the background

- load the album art in the background

Now the user gets to have their cake and eat it too. They can scroll through the list of playlists as fast as is reasonably possible on a Garmin watch, and if they feel like waiting a few seconds, they can see the album art for the current page

If spotify doesn't have a text-only api for playlists, well, that's another hurdle. Garmin could always wrap that in its own api (I'm sure they already do), since you are required to have the Connect app open in order to select items to sync with spotify.

But the first step is for users to care, and to somehow convince spotify/garmin to care

2529455 said:

made even harder when a behemoth like Apple has decided it wants to gobble up your niche of the market.

Yeah Apple Watch explains a lot of the decisions Garmin has made in the past 5 years or so (cough cough venu sq cough cough). A lot of it is good for us, so I can't complain.

2529455 said:

The trouble is that Garmin already has a major gaps like the lack of LTE. Once they have that, there's going to be the gap around messaging (replying to insta/FB/iMessage/WhatsApp from the watch without the phone).

Have 945 LTE and Vivoactive 3 LTE been successful tho?

Without full apple integration Garmin LTE will probably never be successful in North America, and Apple will never let that happen. Then again some ppl might be happy with SMS support at a minimum, with phone calls as a bonus.

I happen to know a dude who wears a Fenix on one arm and an Apple Watch on another....

flowstate said:

added a T9 keyboard

They did not, the whole concept of T9 is word prediction, they just added a multitap numberpad keyboard.