So many issues with SW 23.20 makes me wonder why is Garmin not pulling it and offering a rollback?

I just got a new Forerunner 955 Solar today after replacing my old one and it forced me to update to 23.20 in order to install certain apps including STRYD data fields. The crazy thing is everything looked perfectly fine with the software that was already on the watch! To be fair though I'm only seeing two bugs, one being the broken watch faces and the green elevation profile malfunctions during whatever activity I'm doing. That happened on my old 955 unit and the new one. Thankfully I haven't experienced what others have reported. ‍

I'm also having problems with my forerunner 255S Music. Crashing daily. Sometimes a few minutes after a roboot. And often draining all battery after a crash. Since around may 15th

You can see videos here, which I also shared with support:

https://youtube.com/shorts/_8lkYyRf3mo

https://youtube.com/shorts/I34ZXH8CWX8

https://youtube.com/shorts/wqBtd2ILGd4

Hopefully they will come with a fix or at least enable us to rollback to a working version, 23.20 is a total disaster for me.

I can't get my notifications pushed through to my watch (From iphone) since 23.20, Everything appears to be connected, I've paired / re-paired, removed, paired etc. etc.  nothing.

I'd love to be able to roll back (or forward if a new updates somes out quickly). 

From my personal experience I think that most of the problems are the result of the smart functions and the continuous connection via BT, I have 955 solar and my friend 255, mine is a year and a half old and his is 2 years old, I always use it in stand alone and he is always connected, I have only had problems with battery consumption with a clearly buggy version and then corrected while he often encounters problems, 23.20 included, these SW are too complex and intertwine with each other giving rise to a lot of confusion, if they concentrated on one problem at a time, without creating others every time perhaps it would be the right way, instead of continuing to add useless functions, I see that even 970 and 570 are not very good, calculating the price I would say not at all.

With my 255s, the watch freezing and crashing after 23.20 is uncorrelated with Bluetooth phone connection. 

I keep a logbook (below). The 23.20 upgrade has made my watch basically useless.

It's also idiotically frustrating that they don't let you downgrade to an older firmware that worked.

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5 june 2025

07.00 watch face black, battery dead.

07.33 it powereon while charging but froze when i unplugged it. Long push on a light button turned the screen black. But then holding a light button would not turn it back on again. This was while it was plugged into the cable even. I unplugged it again but now nothing I do can get the watched power up again. Looking very carefully the backlight is not on this time. I will leave it in the charger cable and see if it comes back to life. It did power on again and didn't crash when i unplugged it. Phone sync was off. 

07.56 tried to connect it to the phone because the time was wrong but the user interface on the watch froze again when I pushed the button. Put it on the charger it booted up again the. I connected it to the phone everything seemed fine.

08.11 watches frozen again it was just sitting on my wrist I was doing nothing with it. Holding light button and then pushing it again started the Watch up again.

10.00 watch screen froze 15 minutes into my 30-minute run. I did out have my phone with me. I was listening to music on Spotify on my headphones. Note that last week I also ran 5K race with my music on the full-time and had no problems. Was able to restart the Watch by holding the light button for 15 seconds and then pushing a light button again to turn it back on. After 60 seconds however the Watch was still displaying the triangle and had not booted up. I will go have a shower and see what happens to it when I come down.

10.27 backlight on still. Holding Light button does not cars shutdown. Plugging it into the power supply interestingly the Watch powered up again display came back on and it thought I was still in the middle of my run. But user interface is still frozen. Holding the light button the Watch face went dark and backlight is not on. But holding the light again to try to build it up again even though it is plugged in the charger it is still not starting up. I try to unplugging it from the charger plugging it back into the charger nothing I do can get the watch to turn back on again. Unplugging it and plugging it back in a few times it did start up again and it went straight into the screen to allow me to resume my running activity. But then the user interface crashed immediately again the. I don't have time to debug this any further right now.

11.08 watch started up again, managed to stop run activity. but the frooze a minute later on activity review screen.

12.15 watch black, cannot get it started again even with charger.

4 june 2025

12.14.20: watch was fine, but then i pushed light button, then pushed start stop, then UI immediately froze. hard shutdown. tried turning back on, but watch would not turn on. will try connecting it to power supply when i get a chance. Powered it off by holding the light button for 15 seconds. But now powering it back on by holding light button does not work. I will plug it back into the charger cable. A powerdon immediately when I plugged it into the charger cable. But then it crashed immediately. Use light button to turn it off again. Then I turned it back on again while it was plugged into the charger cable and it powered back up again.

13.37 just noticed that although the screen is still black from when I try to power it off in a dark I can see that the backlight is actually still on. Nonetheless the watch is not responding if I try to use the light button to do a hard power off

13.54 plugged it in. Holding light button, eventually backlight turned off. Then i could get it to turn on again. Huge Battery Drain (>90% in morning to 58%). This time it did not crash immediately when I unplugged it. Turn phone sync back on.

19.07 I also noticed that sleep data of last night made no sense (listed only 3 hours). I check heart rate and it is missing loads of data, all data from last night, even though mh watch had not been frozen.

In fact, all data until I rebooted it. maybe that was because phone connection was off. But still i would expect watch to have saved and synched heart rate data.

3 june 2025

15.24: watch crashed again after run. has been disconnected from phone again since yesterday: again, suggesting crashes are uncorrelated with the phone connection. actually crashed while showing summary screens of my activity. was able to reset it by holding the light button for 15 seconds. Then, at 15.26.32, as soon as it had booted up and shown watch face, it crashed again. did another hard power off. screen went black, but it would not power back up again when holding light button for 2 seconds. was not able to get watch to power back on again. plugged it into power charger cable, then it started booting up. battery is still at 83%, so not sure why power cable should have made any kind of difference. 15.30.33: unplugged it from the power cable (just a charger, no computer) and then it immediately crashed again. did a hard shutdown. again, did not power up. i then plugged it again into the power cable and it booted up. 

2 june 2025

0700: screen frozen with 06.25 as time. not responding to reset.plughed It in. Came alive again. Crashed again at 08.09. reset it. within 5 mins, it had crashee again. 11.29 rebooted it but crashed again and now has black screen. now battery is dead (Get dead battery icon when i tried to turn it on.)

crashed again in the evening. i reset it and tried turning off the phone connection to see if that helps.

1 june 2025

Charged it back up again and turned it on. It crashed after less than 5 minutes. Reset at 13.34.

31 may 2025

Watch froze at 0214 with the light on, woke me up. Rebooted it, but crashed again i guess because battery was empty in the morning 

28 may 2025

Watch face did freeze for 30 min today showing wrong time but seemed to fix itself with no intervention 

27 may 2025

Watch had been crashing 1 to 2 times per day, but did not crash yesterday at all. But just noticed now at 15.20 that watch face was black and batttery was also dead (holding light button for 15 seconds did nothing)

1850: reset device with option delete all data and settings. added it in garmin connect and also restored the backup. Watch face is different. version is still 23.20. Will see how it does for a few days.

23.00 Now it is crashing even after a few seconds I uploaded some videos to youtube. I tried a reset settings without deleting data and this time will not do a restore of the backup (chose “use default settings”). Watch is back up for now. I lost my custom watch face, and my garmin pay again. Let’s see if it can stay running for a day. 

24 may 2025

watch crashed at least 10 times yesterday. every few hours. 

23 may 2025

sent support request:

For the past 1.5 weeks, my watch has been regularly freezing and crashing. The display becomes unresponsive and I have to manually reboot it by holding  the light button for 15 secons. 

This happened 3 or 4 times last week. After a couple of times, it did an updated to software version, which also triggered a reset of all settings, including the watch face and losing all the spotify music I had downloaded. 

After that, the watch became more stable for a few days, but then yesterday started to crash (crashed twice yesterday). And this morning, it had crashed when I woke up. I force-restarted it, then it crashed 2 more times in the past 30 minutes requiring again forced restarts. 

The watch face indicates it is currently using software bundle 23.20. Auto-updates is already on. 

I just checked for updates. It downloaded an update (which it had not done apparently, even though auto-updates was already on and I had charged it for half an hour this morning). 

When it was done downloading the update, it did not do anything. I tried again, and it told me "transfer in progress". Then I tried again, and it started downloading updates again. But no update was installed and the version remained the same. 

I tried force-rebooting it and it remained in the same software version, 23.20. 

As you can maybe understand, having my watch crash multiple times per hour is becoming extremely frustrating. 

Do you know if there is a solution for this? 

Thanks,

Gary 

I then disabled phone sync in the morning. 

15.05: watch had still crashed. also with phone sync off. 

Actually, technically, you can downgrade. I explained how in my reddit post "Garmin FR955 nearly ruined - here's how I saved it". However, I wouldn't do that if I had a warranty.

I think it's always going to be the case that a large majority will be unaffected - otherwise Garmin would certainly have pulled the release.  However, I'm certain that mine is affected.  It might be because mine is an old watch July 2022, and has been through many updates.  Alternatively i know that I'm running a non-standard custom watch-face, although that watch-face appears to be working as normal.

I'd like to downgrade but i read the reddit post referenced above, and i'm not willing to risk the "freezer" approach. There's too much random variability in that method (using a freezer) for me to think i can reliably replicate it.

My plan is either to complain to garmin (I've been hoping they read these forums)

or factory reset my watch (making use of backup restore functions) when i have time.

or... wait for the next release in a few months and see if that unbreaks thing for me!

Good to hear that some people have no issues!

I just don't understand what their possible reason is for not enabling a downgrade. What harm would that cause?

(My watch crashed again yesterday and today...it's a daily event...)

I did factory reset (erase all setting and data) and did a restore from backup. It did not help for me.

I also did a full reset and did not restore from backup. Also did not help.