Month-old Garmin Venu bug represents a worrying trend in fitness watches

What do you want to know

• Garmin Venu Sq 2 owners were unable to download apps or view watch faces in April and May.
• Garmin finally fixed the problem in its backend after more than a month of complaints on the forum.
• Issues related to firmware and updates for fitness watches have increased in recent years across all brands.

Fitness watches are receiving more updates post-launch than before. In theory, this is a good thing. In practice, brands like Garmin and Fitbit are struggling to keep up with their ambitious goals.

Earlier this week, a reader alerted me to a “worsening” problem with the Venu Sq 2, one of our favorite Garmin watches. Over the past month, no one with the Sq 2 or Music edition has been able to connect to Connect IQ. That meant no Spotify, Komoot, new watch faces, or any other third-party apps. A few weeks after the problem appeared, Garmin support opened a ticket, then went into radio silence, frustrating forum users who began to threaten to surrender their Venus.

Then, shortly after, sites like Checking the gradebook started reporting the issue, Garmin engineers “fixed an error in the backend” that was preventing Venu Sq 2 watches and Garmin servers from communicating. Users agreed that the issue was resolved without any updates from them; some asked what the delay was before the thread closed.

The Venu Sq 2 is a sort of gateway product for Garmin. Its relatively affordable price and lightweight circle-shaped design make the transition easy for Apple Watch users or fans of other inexpensive fitness watches, who might find other Garmins too rugged, expensive, or too specialized. So for new Venu Sq 2 owners – especially those who paid $50 more for music storage – not having access to apps for more than a month is a big deal.

Garmin has also been the subject of complaints in recent months about a Garmin Forerunner update with an unintended side effect: It allegedly caused the watches’ optical HR sensors to significantly underestimate heart rate data.

In my case, I’ll notice during hard trail runs with my Forerunner 965 that my heart rate is about 30-40 bpm too low for about a lap before it automatically corrects itself. Otherwise, it performed very well in a Garmin vs Coros vs Polar heart rate test, but unfortunately other users report unresolved issues with high or low HR even more regularly, even months later.

While these long-standing issues don’t look great for Garmin, I will note that buggy software updates with unintended consequences seem to be a worrying trend with fitness watches and trackers recently.

I immediately remembered the Fitbit Charge 5 fiasco earlier this year: Fitbit updated the Charge 5 with new clock faces and languages, with the unintended side effect of overcharging the Charge 5’s battery to the point as users reported that the 7-day fitness tracker could only last. half a day maximum. A month later, tech sites caught wind of the problem; Fitbit said the update wasn’t to blame, without explaining why Charge 5 trackers broke after factory resets or could no longer track sleep.

I don’t know if this problem has ever been resolved. At the time, Google offered users a 50% discount for the Charge 6 replacement, but many longtime Fitbit fans have given up on the brand for good.

Although I reviewed the Polar Vantage V3 positively, it also got off to a rocky start. My review unit would crash during a long hiking or running activity, causing a boot loop that wouldn’t end until the battery died or I found a way to reset it to factory settings. Other reviewers and first day buyers have reported similar issues.

The latest firmware updates did nothing to fix the problem, so Polar sent me a new watch. This device has never crashed once a month or so I have used it. The fact remains that Polar has not managed to find a way to remotely resolve this major software problem. Then, it delayed the launch of the Polar Grit X2 Pro to take more time to resolve firmware issues.

No matter which fitness brand you prefer, you’re more likely to encounter serious software issues these days. I suspect there is an obvious culprit: ambition.

Too many watches, not enough support

We are seeing a trend today where fitness watches are trying to become smart watches to compete with mainstream smart watches. For this reason, brands like Garmin and Fitbit are putting more effort into post-launch updates to keep their watches relevant for years to come – just like a Galaxy or Apple Watch gets three or four years of updates features and support.

Mainstream smartwatches also have more powerful processors, more resources, and fewer models. If Samsung wants to test a new Wear OS 5 feature, it should check out the Galaxy Watch 4, 5, 5 Pro, and 6. That’s not unreasonable for such a massive company.

Garmin sells dozens watches at some point. Even though they share the same general software and user interface, a $1,000 Fenix ​​has more powerful capabilities than a $250 Venu Sq 2. So each watch receives its own updates and (presumably) requires its own QA testing with each new feature update.

Most other fitness brands take a similar multi-device approach. Amazfit sells around twenty smart watches, not counting its older models, which still benefit from support. Google and Fitbit offer around 10 products combined. COROS only has four watches, but is still updating watches launched years ago with brand new software like turn-by-turn navigation.

With so many watches on the market at once, made by brands with smaller teams, bugs are bound to slip through the cracks.

The Garmin forums are full of bug reports; some are specific to a broken watch, and others are due to user error. So when a real, a widespread bug appears, like the Venu Sq 2 app crashing or Forerunners HR inaccuracies, the support team will respond with canned advice until enough people talk about it to be able to do resolving the problem. Even then, it may take time to find a suitable solution.

Again, this isn’t specifically about Garmin. Other brands may have been slower to recognize the problem or failed to identify the cause. This is because these brands would launch one product and then move on to the next, rarely adding more than a few new features after launch. This made it easier to avoid bugs.

Now that users expect a proper software update post-launch, for fitness watches, these brands need to integrate features on optimized chips at launch to maximize battery life. In some cases this is likely to cause problems, and athletes with a previously functional watch must spend weeks waiting for a solution. And with so many watches on the market, you never know if yours will slip through the cracks.