To start with.. I'm a long customer of Garmin... Edge 800, 820, 830, Fenix 3, VAHR, 935, VIRB, Varia, etc etc.... I'm IT person for all of my life, and I know a little bit on how SW (and SW development) works.
I've upgraded from 935 to 945 this spring when they first became available, because I needed longer battery life.
What I want to say, that with Garmin any single new day brings us new software bug, and I'm so tired about it. It's not a hardware problem that could be easily fixed with swapping the watch by support guys. But rather it is a bunch of multiple software issues. During my both A races this summer Garmin failed me multiple times with restarts, freezes, etc when running on higher altitude (known bug, one can search here on the same forum); at the end of my second race after 21 hours of running watch didn't want to save the run and instead constantly rebooting. I had to connect my watch to laptop and copy fit file manually.
In December, when I get out for a long run, neither Strava routes, nor Koomot were able to download me my route. I spent 30+ minutes on fresh winter morning (-5C) trying to figure a way to download the route from smartphone to watch (I have done this so many times in the past so I was assuming that day would be no difference... I was wrong). No way... garmin silently changed ConnectIQ API, and now no one can download nothing to watch. This was working properly - now it doesn't work.
Today I had a plan to go out for long run. Ok, I'm leaving hotel, checking HRM, checking footpod, starting the run... Aaaaand "Loading maps". Whaaaat??? I haven't change anything in last several weeks (other than flying to Istanbul). My assumption was that since I have European watch, I should have map of Istanbul preloaded. Probably that is true.... Probably I would never know, because my watch already spent 40+ minutes on the progress bar Loading maps.... and while I'm writing this, it still not completed and I can't start the run (yes for sure, I can go for a run without a watch, or with Strava app on my smartphone).
To finish this emotional post..... I lost my trust in Garmin and I'm seriously disappointed. My 945 (top-notch in Garmin watch) fails me every single day. And they specially fails me when I need them most.
