Is this watch supported by Garmin

Clearly Garmin doesn't care, too big to fail, people will buy anyway. Today I woke up late, seems that watch froze at 8.23am but when I checked my phone it was 9.09 am, industry in general started pushing unfinished software/firmware because of the demand, fired testers and they've offloaded the testing onto customers.

No updates, no responses, no beta, 1.5 month has gone by, premium device seems to be abandoned, does Garmin know that it failed at launch? 
I have a lot of Garmin devices and had them for years, none of them were perfect, all had issues I could live with, but with this watch, ahh what a joke, advertised features that I bought the watch for are hit and miss. I've upgraded from 965, and this feels like I just threw money down the drain. 

This is probably going to be my last Garmin device, competition is growing, some devices can last a long as Garmin, Garmin for the time being still has an advantage of mapping, data they have collected over the years and algorithms tailored to that data, but that will change and it will change fast.

Most of the competition provides better UI/UX and apps, Garmin doesn't, old, slow and dated.

Making apps for Garmin, system is too locked down, and the experience is at least 15 years behind everyone 

Garmin, wake up, or go down Nokia's path

Personally, I still use it normally and think it's better than other brands.

You should have been around for the release of FR 945! That was truly a sh*t show.

No issues here and have used it daily for weeks. 

Even their flagship watch Fenix 8 was released with numerous and easy to see bugs and some of those bugs are still not fixed even though they affect functionality of the watch. You should not be not surprised that this happens on other Garmin watches as well. 

While using Fenix 7 I noticed that many software updates are very buggy and that bugs reported by users in beta stage were not fixed before releasing software as public. This has been happening repeatedly, leading me to believe that this is the best they can do - they have incapable/limited capacities or simply do not care (or both), thus they make releases no matter if products or software is ready for release or not. 

Garmin has a well publicised quarterly firmware update cycle,  the last update was about 5 or 6 weeks ago,  so the next update cycle will start in 7 -8 weeks.  However the watch looks like it will form part of the ɓeta-test cycle,  this typically happens about a month before standard firmware updates, so in line with update policy,  I'd expect a ɓeta firmware in 3-4 weeks. 

• Think you are missing the fact there are urgent bugs that require fixing.now.  This has nothing to do with the quarterly update cycle! 

100% this. 

I work in software. We have a release schedule. But if one of my times borks prod it gets fixed immediately. Not at our leisure. 

That being said we also test our software before releasing. 

Fozzee1970 said:

Think you are missing the fact there are urgent bugs that require fixing.now.

Absolutely. After Garmin botched the Fenix 8 release where it took weeks until they fixed critical bugs they repeat it on the 970 release.

I do not understand why they are not able to release hotfixes once a week or so when they bring out new products. I would be more kind to early adopters.