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Comment by jtbaker | Hacker News Reader

The clunkiness of the software is a feature to me. I don't want my watch to have the slickest apps, I want it to be pretty utilitarian, rugged and functional. My Instinct Crossover is pretty perfect for that.

The only thing that I think could be better (for me) would be a very rudimentary basemap view in addition to the existing breadcrumb trail functionality.

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It's not the clunkiness of the software that's the problem, it's the bugs. They frequently introduce regression defects in new releases. Like on my watch, suddenly structured track running workouts stopped tracking speed correctly and it took them like a year to fix it. I get the impression that they have a lack of test automation and too few human QA Engineers to manually test every feature on every release of every one of their many devices.

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/06/competitor-software-inst...

Garmin routinely stops all development for even the flagship model just a few years back, bugs be damned

my Fenix6 still doesn't work correctly, no more updates

People dropping $1000+ on a Garmin better understand that's just for a few years, not a decade

On my Fenix 6, Bluetooth volume control broke after a few years, and now the volume slider does nothing, which the hivemind confirmed.

So, it is in fact worse than not getting upgrades, the software actually deteriorated over its lifecycle.

on the flip side, my 12 year old garmin fenix 3 still works great. I finally upgraded to an instinct crossover last year because I wanted the mechanical hands and a smaller face, but the old Fenix is still great.

I always thought it would be a really neat, very progressive idea if Garmin would "open source" firmware for models that are several generations back

The fenix3 would be fascinating as an open-source test model

Yeah I'm still mad at garmin for a bug they introduced to my Oregon 550 GPS which caused data to be lost. They actually broke the track archiving feature so badly it looked like no one had even tested it.

> The clunkiness of the software is a feature to me.

Yes!

But it seems they are getting more and more in the _smartwatch_ territory.

It took me more time than I wanted to disable any kind of notifications on my new Enduro 3. And a few weeks ago, with the latest update, I got the "morning thing" and "evening thing" enable automatically, so I had once again to get back in the settings to disable them.

Previously with the Fenix I set a watch face, activities screen and I hadn't to change a thing for years. It just worked as a watch and an activity recorder. Exactly what I want from this kind of device.

The rough part is very poor UX and lots and lots of bugs. I have to give tutorials on how to use my edge when I lend it to people, it's so easy to do weird things by accident and is not obvious what's going on.

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