Can't get touchscreen to work with maps on Forerunner 970

flowstate said:

Luckily Garmin devices are open enough that you had this workaround. I'm sure if Garmin started out as a company today, there would be zero access to the file system for anything like this.

so true

renschler said:

Good news is if anyone else has this issue they can use the attached default maps profile (unzip it first) and just drop it in their NewFiles/ folder

Interestingly, FIT file viewer says that the touch setting is "system" in this case. This makes sense, especially since there's no independent touch setting for the Map activity (or any activities?) anymore in FR970, like you said.

However, FR955 doesn't support a "system" setting for touch. As you know, for activities, the settings are Touch On, Touch Off, and Use Map.

My guess is that FR970 doesn't support Touch On for activity profiles, since, as you said, this is handled by activity focus modes now.

So this would explain the problem you're seeing. When your FR970 imported the Map activity profile from the backup, it translated Touch = On to Touch = Off, instead of Touch = System.

Only question is why it only did that for the Map profile and not any of the other activity profiles.

Either way it's fairly predictable that Garmin would mess up something like this tbh. I've seen it a million times.

People are also seeing things like auto lap being enabled for golf activities (which is impossible to turn off since it's not in the UI).

Oh ok then it makes perfect sense.

Map used to be more like an "activity" (which perhaps makes little sense to the end user since it can't actually record an activity FIT file like every other activity), now it's more like an "app" (which maybe makes more sense than before), even though it's still an activity profile under the covers (and likely still shares code with other activities, especially the map part, which is all it does).

And when this change was made, the related removal of the touch setting for Map was overlooked in the context of restoring the activity profile from a backup of an older model. Internally, the map profile FIT file needs to have Touch = System, otherwise the Map touch mode won't follow the focus modes as it should. But ofc, the older watches don't have Touch = System in the map profile (or any other activity profile).

Whatever code does the translation/validation of the Map profile should translate Touch: On => Touch: System, instead of Touch: On => Touch: Off. 

But like I said this kind of thing is predictable because there are all these moving parts with complex dependencies that always get overlooked when things change in one department but somebody forgot to tell the other department. Like changes in the product that break things in Connect IQ. One time it was impossible to build CIQ apps for Enduro 2 for *several months* due to a change that was supposed to happen in the product that prompted a change in Connect IQ, except the change in the product never happened. Even though devs told the CIQ team about it almost immediately, somehow it got dropped for a couple of months. And in the end, the change to CIQ was eventually reverted anyway, making the whole thing even funnier. But more recently there's been an issue where some old apps appear to support Tactix 8 but actually don't. This is kind of like the flip side of the Enduro 2 bug, which tells me that nothing was learned from the Enduro 2 fiasco.

What's disappointing is bugs of the same nature seem to happen all the time with Garmin, but past mistakes aren't learned from (apparently). Like the "half cadence" bug that plagued Fenix watches on and off for years.

yeah I agree, it makes sense for maps to be within some sort of app section

My comment was more about the way they've done controls vs apps section, its confusing and somewhat redundant

I think it's also annoying that these apps are given 1st tier status, IE they show up on the first page when you click the start button, but I am limited to 3 sport profiles that can be at this first layer.

My main use case for my watch is the sport profiles, now I have to go one layer deeper to start an activity (unless it's run/bike/mobility which are my 3 pinned activities). I'd much rather be digging deeper for these apps (I'll never use most of them, except for maps lol).

renschler said:

My comment was more about the way they've done controls vs apps section, its confusing and somewhat redundant

Yeah I get it.

I was just saying that the actual bug you saw makes 100% sense given that Garmin has changed Map from an "activity" to an "app" (from the user's POV), and in the process, removed the ability to independently customize touch settings for Map, while leaving that ability in the other activity profiles.

And I also think that it's very predictable for Garmin to overlook things when there's complex dependencies like this because I've seen it happen a million times.

renschler said:

I think it's also annoying that these apps are given 1st tier status, IE they show up on the first page when you click the start button, but I am limited to 3 sport profiles that can be at this first layer.

My main use case for my watch is the activity profiles, now I have to go one layer deeper to start an activity (unless it's run/bike/mobility which are my 3 pinned activities). I'd much rather be digging deeper for these apps (I'll never use most of them, except for maps lol).

Yeah I think other people have complained about this.

In a way it seems like a throwback to the really old Garmins (like FR235) which just had 2 or 3 activity profiles, and a separate list of CIQ apps, except that now the CIQ apps and native apps get top billing. Idk, maybe they are trying to move to an app-first model? Good luck with that, as CIQ apps are bad and there isn't really that much in the way of native apps. I guess they might be trying to change that.

They probably figure *most* people don't regularly use a ton of different activity profiles. But then again in recent years they've added a ton of activity profiles that are essentially just clones of Cardio with a different sport type, so it seems like they're all over the map.

Fwiw I only regularly use 4 different activity profiles: Run, Run workout (run w/different settings for interval workouts), Basketball and Strength. But 3 probably isn't enough for many people (especially triathletes).

renschler said:

Good news is if anyone else has this issue they can use the attached default maps profile (unzip it first) and just drop it in their NewFiles/ folder (also change the file name to GenericMap.fit after you unzip it, i'm not sure why the file uploader added the 8156. to the front of the file name).

As with any file that you drop in NEWFILES/ I don't think the actual filename matters (except maybe for the extension - in this case, ".FIT").

Interesting that you used backup from the 945 to the 955. I only saw the backup / restore function as a new adition to the fenix7/epix2 and later to the 955. 

The one time I used this function was when I sent a quatix7 (epix2 like) back to Garmin with faulty buttons and they sent me a replacement one. Since it was the same watch it was nice to restore the backup. 

Now when setting up the new 970 it indeed offered me to restore settings from the 955 as well as from the quatix7 (old backup from like 18 months ago before I sold it).