MBO – Garmin Watch Apps for Mountain Bike Orienteering

I've done quite a bit of remote MTB/gravel riding/touring (e.g. much of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route [1]), and have settled on loading GPX tracks onto a Garmin head unit. Turn-by-turn is pretty useless, because the notion of a "turn" is too ambiguous to be useful. Anyway, with a GPX track loaded the head unit will display the path, and you can tell when you deviate significantly. Oftentimes the turns are onto nearly invisible tracks; situational awareness will sometimes save you, but expect to miss some turns. This may sound unreliable, but it's a huge step up from everything else I've tried.

[1] https://www.adventurecycling.org/routes-and-maps/adventure-c...

I use gaiagps. Its very good for hiking and biking. Should also work for mtb. Had a garmin watch ( fenix 5s) once and that thing sucked hard compared to my phone. Its like a bad phone that can measure your puls.

I use Komoot. But it is not specialized on MB you can hike/walk/run with it as well.

> competitive orienteering, but on mountain bikes

I guess your a talking about MTBO competitions (Mountain Bike Orienteering Sport) and ISMTBOM maps (IOF's International Standard for MTBO Maps).

If so, I'm not sure is there (or is it not) for Garmin Watch devices, but there is OpenOrienteering Mapper[0] — an Android app (and Linux, macOS, Windows, etc.) designed for orienteering mapping, which may be used also for orienteering competitions as digital map with GPS tracking.

[0] https://www.openorienteering.org/apps/mapper

I’ve been building free Garmin apps and watch-faces since 2016.

Any developer can download the ConnectIQ SDK and freely publish an app or watch-face in the Garmin App Store. Does not require any license to build, install or publish an app.

That definitely wasn’t true when I developed my watch face (https://github.com/kelnage/digital-simplicity) - the Garmin IDE compiled it down to a single IQ file which can then be transferred directly to the device via USB.

Of course if you want to distribute it via their App Store you have to apply (it was free when I did it), and the way changing settings used to work (through a convoluted path on the connected mobile device and via the store) it was often best to do that. But you could also use the settings file software Garmin included in their IDE to do it (or now do it directly on the device).

Afaik if you have the watch locally available you can just connect it to your PC and deploy it there.

Even the SDK is available for "free": https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/overview/

This is not true, has not been true for years, and probably was never true at least since the public release of their app store.