Garmin’s Biggest Competitor Is Their Own Software Instability

The article is too long. I have stuff to do.


-Tim-

I can't disagree with much of what he said. I have felt that way about Garmin for many years. I still use their products because they work for what I want to do. Great hardware maker, poor software maker.

He does tend to go on and on, doesn’t he. But I have to agree with the gist of what he’s saying. LiveTrack is hit or miss, phone pairing is more art than science, and my incident detection alarm sometimes goes off simply stopping at a traffic light. The one time I actually fell over it didn’t register. My old 500 would lock up every March when changing to daylight savings time or when I traveled east a time zone, can’t handle springing forward.

The thing is, for a lot of us Garmin users we are kind of OCD about our data. If you couldn't reliably handle that over a well-established bluetooth connection, it undermines the users confidence in the device's reliability. Why I would trust my life on it, being it livetracking by my wife or incident detection alerts, if they couldn't even get the simple connections sorted.

I didn't finish it either.

The page length is 95% comments. The actual article is not that long, and it's full of pictures.

I have the Garmin Edge 1000 .... I see that the Garmin forum has now changed and there is no longer a section for the Edge 1000 .... that sucks as I frequented the forum often to see what new software updates were available and what bugs other users found

I agree with his point about Garmin being buggy, but he only brought up one example. The tracking feature. I guess the article would have been even longer had he started talking about all the myriad of problems Garmin's products have, but it's a long article with only one example. Wahoo is vastly superior in my opinion when it comes to ease of use, and functionality. Garmin seems to be stuck in the 90's, even with the look and feel of their products (and quality of operation!).

I am a garmin user. Never had any issues and it always works. I wish I could change just a few things but nothing to stop me from switching it either. I am a satisfied customer.

RainM is a great place too, like the views and reviews. Does an awesome job. Maybe something good will come of this.

For what it's worth, I had an Edge 800 (pre BT) for almost a decade, and have had Fenix watches for several years. My stuff has almost always worked as advertised. Haven't used Live Tracking in a long time though.

It seems like their watches are more stable than their Edges. Mine only ever drops the BT connection when I go out of range, and I wear it all the time, not just on the bike.

My Fenix 5x Sapphire has worked flawlessly since I got it...I really like it.

The Edge 500 and the 1000 tour model worked alright too...although I could never get the crash feature to work on the tour model and Bluetooth upload sucked. It's supposed to alert someone if it senses a crash but I could never get it to work properly and just forgot about that feature. Truth be told, it may have been operator error but I did not find it user friendly at all. I also had an issue with it switching screens due to water on the screen when I first got it but eventually figured that out. So, in my limited anecdotal experience the watches are less buggy than the edge units.

No they are not. We have had several of their watches, FR325/FR735/Fenix5/FR645 (between my daughter and I), for example, the bluetooth connection to the phone is never reliable, and it's across the board for all these watches, just like it's an issue with all their Edge devices. And another example, they release the FR645 as the music watch (with storage on board, and integration with Spotify and whatnot), but it doesn't work with Apple AirPods - now you tell me, as a product manager, would I ever release a consumer music device that doesn't work with 60% of wireless earbuds in the market? How would you NOT insist that it must work with the AirPods. When I talked to their support people, they told me it's Apple's problem because the AirPods use some proprietary implementation of the bluetooth profile, I am like, so what? This is a competitive business, not who's right or who's wrong. That there tells you a lot about their mindset.

I turned anti-Garmin when I bought my 520. I always got less elevation than everyone else, the battery life started nose-diving right out of the box, and the pairing (BT and sensor) issues were ever-present. Don't get me wrong-- it worked, probably a solid 95% of the time. But it would also crash and reboot mid-ride absolutely out of nowhere, or lock up while saving a ride and then pretend as if it never happened. Oh, and let's not forget the good ol' GPS Timecode errors-- the 520 would lose track of the satellites (again) and then resync, but add like 300 hours to my moving time. Strava wouldn't even upload the file. My 520 was such an airhead I still have fitfiletools.com in my toolbar. And then there's the oft-required restarts, and the.... etc, etc. Now the Edge 500 on the other hand... it ate a grand total of one ride in it's 5+ years of service, and that was due to full memory. It still resides in a drawer as the backup computer, will still get 12+ hours on a charge, and I bought it refurbished.

I'm a Wahoo guy now. My Bolt has been absolutely flawless since it came out of the box. The first bike computer I've ever owned that genuinely feels like it was designed by someone who actually rides a bicycle.

My Garmins work perfectly 95-99% of the time. If I wasn't obsessive over my data, I might not notice when the software doesn't work right. To be fair, most of the software I use works 95-99% of the time. I wish it was better, but that's simply the state of software.

FWIW, my bike, my car, and my AC also work 95-99% of the time. C'est la vie.

Same watch. I pre-ordered mine, so that's 2.5 (?) years now? I use it every time on the bike, hiking, lifting weights 3x per week, swimming, and running. One issue on one activity in all that time, seems to be a 3rd party data field.

That used to be the case when I had a Fenix 3 and a different phone. When I changed phones, the BT connection became rock solid and has been for years since. I also use mine to know what time it is which means I'm wearing it always, and it vibrates when BT drops. That really only happens when I go out of range.

Sounds like this happens with multiple (different?) phones for you, so that's probably not it.

This will inevitably turn into a Garmin bug rant vs "I've never had a problem with my Garmin" thread.

What I find more interesting however, is that rainmaker would post a 3800 word essay/analysis of Garmin's business practices complete with custom photography, pie charts, whitty quips and in depth analysis as if this is somehow a topic worthy of such an epic work.

I don't think a paid consultant would provide a quality analysis such as this.


-Tim-

My issue , is too, the dropping of live track. My wife gets excited , when the live track connection is dropped. But, she will send a text, sometimes the text shows up on the Garmin, sometimes , not. Even when the live track icon, is showing on the Garmin, but I'll hear the text , stop, I let her know all is okay. Pain in the butt, but for the most part, it works. I end up, doing the restart function on the phone, and it re-connects, live trak starts working. KB

Life360 can track you by your wife if you carry a phone with you anyway. I tried the LiveTracking on Garmin but stopped using it for the exact reason you described - who wants to stop in the middle of group ride.

I fail to grasp the point of this post. Far as I can see, this has not turned into a Garmin bug rant vs "I've never had a problem with my Garmin" thread.

I do think DCR is right on this one. I've seen it many times on this forum. The main reason people buy Wahoo, etc, is because they're tired of their Garmin.

He gets units early from Garmin and info too. I'm a little surprised he'd publish this.

Garmin just replace my 520+ for a BT chip failure. I pre-ordered last year and it worked perfectly for the 10 months leading up to the failure where I would have to re-pair after every two or three rides. I sent an email to support detailing the problems and what I had done to troubleshoot, and they opened an RMA without any further questions. I bought the 520+ after 7 years of flawless performance from an Edge 500, but today, if I had a do over, I'd probably buy the Wahoo.

FWIW, the Livetrack feature has always seemed to work just fine, and even when I've dropped phone connection mid-ride, the livetrack has continued through the automatic reconnect.