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Beta 5.46 appears to have fixed the CIQ battery issue

I have stayed at 5.00 and went to 5.46 yesterday. After my first night with it using the same CIQ face I have used for months my battery loss was about the same as 5.00. 

  • Great to hear!

    I wrote a comment to https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/i/bug-reports/battery-drain-issues-on-va4-and-4s-using-ciq-watch-faces-since-sw-5-10-release about the fact that SW 5.46 might fix the issue. I am not home during the weekend but can't wait to try the new beta early next week.

    Anyway, let's not forget that we were asked twice to contact CIQ face developers about battery drains using CIQ watch faces from SW 5.10 onwards... It sucks to get this sort of support but I think the CIQ bug report helped (it is the 2nd most voted bug after all).

    Cheers!

  • Wait. I am a bit new to the update cycles. Why is there a 5.21 beta, stalled 5.30, and now a 5.46 without finishing previous versions?

  • Well I guess that if you further modify an existing version, it has to have a higher number, because it is not the original version anymore.

  • I can confirm as well. I put my favorite watch face SC8 back on yesterday. It is fairly data heavy, and battery drain seems back to normal. Garmin wanted to replace my watch too. I'm glad I didn't accept.

  • There are internal versions of FW that never go public.

    With FW versions, if they end in 0, they a production FW, if not 0, they are beta and need to be installed manually.

  • I wonder if they will provide anything more than just these fixes as part of the public release following this beta, because, apart from the battery issue fix, it must be one of their most uninspiring releases ever.

    There are known bugs and inconsistencies in graphics and animations that this beta doesn't resolve, even though many have reported them to their mailing list months ago. So this beta doesn't even pass as a maintenance release.

    As for new features, don't expect anything. A sleep widget that appeared as a hidden (non-working) option under the "My Day" settings in the previous beta has now disappeared again.

    This beta looks like what the VA3 was getting when the VA4 was released. My guess is that the VA4 is now reaching EOL and their developers are working hard to get a working version for VA5.

  • I am afraid my opinion might be really unpopular around here, but at this point I will be actually happy if they can just focus on fixing bugs (like the battery drain with CIQ faces) rather than introducing half-baked features. I am happy with the feature set, I only need a reliable watch and I want to stop worrying about future updates.

  • I cannot confirm that it improves battery life for me with the Tonix Classic watch face. At first, it seemed to be draining slower, but in the end I still got about 4 days from a full charge. (Usual use during winter is one activity per day without GPS, Pulse Ox overnight, and pretty stead stream of work notifications via Slack/Teams/etc.)

  • Not really, I also believe bug fixing should be their top priority. I just wanted to point out the sad state of Garmin's development efforts, because this reminds me of what happened with the VA3. They just replaced it with a newer product without ever bothering to fix the battery issues. It's the same thing all over again.

    Not only do they not provide any added functionality during the product's lifecycle (unlike the vast majority of the other vendors), they don't even get to make it work as advertised.

    This has to stop at some point. 

  • how did you manage to update 5.46?