Setting 955 data screens in GCM flaky

PubBike said:

It is great that the watch settings for glances and apps are available in Garmin Connect Mobile.

However, it is quite buggy:

Is it really great to have features that don’t actually work though? It’s very on brand for Garmin, but I think it’s a terrible look.

The best part is that if you complain in certain parts of the Garmin forums about bugs, you will either be told to contact Garmin support, or your experience will be dismissed by people who don’t have the same problem or don’t use that feature.

Garmins are great as long as you don’t use all the features and/or you’re prepared to use workarounds for any problems you encounter.

Just like these forums are ok as long as you ignore the stuff that doesn’t work, the cosmetic problems, the UX issues, and the terrible mobile experience. (It’s very appropriate that Garmin chose this forum platform instead of a modern platform, when they migrated from the old platform.)

PubBike said:

If I don't press 'SAVE" at the top, and just press back no warning is given and the settings are lost.

It’s not the first time the Connect app has had a problem like this. It’s also very on brand for Garmin to repeat the same kinds of bugs / design problems over and over again across the years.

Ofc others will say “everyone has bugs” and “switch to apple if you’re so unhappy” as if expecting things to work properly is the most unreasonable thing in the world. This is stuff that Garmin chose to put in their products, nobody forced them to add buggy features at gunpoint.

There’s also poorly designed stuff that’s persisted in Connect for years, like the gear selection UI.

If I can be bothered I'll report this.

I agree with you though.

How hard can it be to test this stuff?  And apply a consistent UI?  Surely it is harder to apply an inconsistent UI as you have to code something new?  Doesn't make any sense.

Allowing the user to leave a screen where settings have been changing is something we expected in 1990, but it is completely unacceptable in 2024.

I think the problem is that Garmin hasn't applied a consistent approach here with the CANCEL button on the top left and the SAVE button on the top right being different from the rest of GCM, and neither being linked with the back button in any useful way.   

It would be simpler to get rid of the SAVE and CANCEL buttons altogether and to always save the settings regardless like elsewhere as in any case you can delete any folder/data screen that you don't need from the previous menu.  We're not talking about a massive amount of data, but quite a lot of frustration!

PubBike said:

It would be simpler to get rid of the SAVE and CANCEL buttons altogether and to always save the settings regardless like elsewhere as in any case you can delete any folder/data screen that you don't need from the previous menu.  We're not talking about a massive amount of data, but quite a lot of frustration!

I think they have a save button because the loading and saving of real-time settings is quite slow (*), so they don’t want to save settings every time you change a single field (that would be unbearably slow). (* Even DCR pointed out that when you use real-time settings, you’re gonna see the “running man” animation a lot.)

So the only real alternative is to have a button to explicitly save the whole page of settings. (They can’t just implicitly save the settings when you leave the page, because there’s no way to force the user to leave the page after they change any of the settings. The user could just close the app or switch away from the app, without leaving the page.)

PubBike said:

How hard can it be to test this stuff? 

Evergreen comment.

PubBike said:

If I can be bothered I'll report this.

Yeah I feel like the experience for new users of high-end Garmin devices and new third-party Connect IQ app developers is similar: you start out all idealistic and excited about all the cool features in the products and ecosystem. Very quickly you start to find glaring and annoying bugs. As idealistic as you are, you’ll post about these bugs in the forums and report them directly to Garmin. You’ll find that people on the forums will push back (as mentioned above) and that dealing with Garmin directly will not always be fruitful. (To be fair, Garmin fixes a lot of stuff. But they also leave a lot of stuff broken, especially if it’s only a bad design and not an outright bug).

After years of this nonsense, users and devs tend to become jaded. They probably stop bothering to report minor bugs, and in the extreme case, they become the type of poster who attacks other posters who complain about stuff.

PubBike

Thank you very much for sharing, and  I'm sorry that you are seeing these strange error messages. Please answer the following so I can get this reported: 

1. What is the make/model of your phone?
2. What is your phones' software version?
3. In the Connect app, go to More > Settings > App version. Can you confirm it's on 5.7.1?
4. I'm not sure when you exactly downloaded sw version 21.19 on the watch, but can you confirm that the above concerns still happen on sw 21.19?
5. May I have permission to contact you via email?
6. May we, if necessary, have permission to view your Connect account?

Thank you!