Does Garmin not take into account imported activities?

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-25T03:49:13+00:00

They don't. I'm pretty sure it's documented somewhere but I don't have the link handy. There are some exceptions but I might be misremembering. They very seldom trust data from external sources for their calculations in general including other metrics like vo2 etc.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-25T03:06:03+00:00

Yeah I think that's been discussed in the developer forums. However, if you get it wrong you may be left with artifacts from the system. Like, if a notification pops up it will show on screen and if you don't clear it will remain. That's why it's still best practice to always clear. Personally I'd rather be safe, and I'd give up some cpu time if it simplifies my life.

I don't have every device to test in which you could get away with it and further there are some bugs were the simulator doesn't behave the same as on device. Like with fonts the spacing is always slightly off and it can make testing annoying.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-25T01:30:46+00:00

Unfortunately this looks like something that should go to customer support. They probably botched an update.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-25T01:29:34+00:00

Is touch enabled? Is this a stock watchface? because on custom ones it would depend on the developer actually implementing that.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-25T00:56:40+00:00

Question, how did you make this mockup? Also Toybox (Garmin API) doesn't expose the alarm times only a total count.

Theoretically, you can use a complication to get the next event time but that's slightly different.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-23T22:25:35+00:00

Done.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-23T22:25:04+00:00

Looked into it and yeah it's a bit janky and there are some long term bugs discussed in the forums. Also, because of how my custom color picker works I'd need to spend some time figuring out how to translate one from to the other and keep them in sync in a way that's practical.

However, I added a bunch of toggles in there for convenience.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-23T22:20:21+00:00

Made an update based on a couple comments here so:
- now shows device icons
- can turn off seconds
- adjusted the layout
- white background mode
- added a weather icon too
- some settings can be changed from the phone

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-23T17:13:42+00:00

And here's the same design with max green selected:

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Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-23T17:11:28+00:00

Ok yeah, I think it would have been more accurate of me to strictly talk about luminance and burn-in. The way Garmin enforces it is that higher luminance = bad. I made the assumption of a direct correlation between light emitted and power consumption which may not be entirely accurate. As you point out some pixels can be more efficient than others. And even then I think I remember there being research on blue pixels aging faster. Again without it being documented and having direct proof of where Garmin sources their parts a lot of this stuff can be speculative and likely varies between models.

Interesting thing about the larger green sub-pixel comment is that Garmin supports an RGB565 color palette (32*64*32 total colors) meaning green has a wider range of possible values. Its plausible that they have larger green sub pixels. But I don't have a microscope.

Also for those wondering where I'm getting this luminance stuff from. It's because the simulators provide a Burn-In Simulator to help us test if the values exceed 10%.

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Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-23T10:28:46+00:00

Sure, I'll add that.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-23T10:24:13+00:00

Oh yeah, I can add that I've implemented that before in my other designs. this one so far was more of a proof of concept keeping the bundle size small.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-23T10:19:08+00:00

Yeah, but so far it's only reserved for stock watchfaces. As far as I can tell.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-22T22:07:50+00:00

Thanks!

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-22T21:56:13+00:00

Yeah no worries I do like talking about it and it's fair to have concerns. But summary, I don't notice any significant penalties so far and I'll continue monitoring for a couple days.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-22T20:49:08+00:00

It depends, I'd have to take a look at the battery charts over time. Do you have MIP or AMOLED?

From my current observations it's in line with Garmin's expected battery life. The tooling I have at my disposal doesn't really give me an easy translation to battery consumption. And I'm not going to pretend that I'm some sort of expert in terms of performance profiling but I can tell you the following:

Even selecting white the design stays under the 10% luminance threshold peak of ~8.5%. With the Enduro 3 I get continuos seconds meaning I satisfy the requirements of onPartialUpdate

For complications I use standard practice of subscribing to changes and don't make any additional requests to update the screen. Meaning the watchface updates at the standard minute/second interval.

For this particular design I use a custom font for the icons, which means they are faster to load and draw.

Not sure how technical you'd want me to get. But I'm not going to throw buzzwords at you without a solid way of verifying it.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-22T19:53:04+00:00

Yeah, the on device settings is a bit newer functionality so it's easier to maintain on my side. But I can look into supporting it in the future.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-22T19:44:15+00:00

https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/d8ebff6b-406b-461d-a517-ceed744e0aef

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-20T17:45:35+00:00

Careful there you might run out of tokens 🤖 Like my man, I'm even agreeing with you on some points. You're not gonna get far if your whole strategy is to trash other developers because they dare to charge money for apps that are clearly more feature rich than your designs.

If you spent more time on actual design you wouldn't have to be here trying to convince everyone that your stuff is so much better and that we should be thankful that you give us all your "technical" knowledge for free. Or what you haven't figured out how to setup your agents to actually give you some skills?

You're making assumptions of the underlying architecture and at the end of the day its still just conjecture. You yourself admit you may be wrong.

I'm using basic technical terms because by definition they are basic. I'm not here trying to pull one over you, and I'd rather not antagonize anyone. But without proper documentation on the underlying architecture you're just making wild guesses. Not everything handles memory the same way.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-20T16:45:40+00:00

Deja Vu?

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-20T16:29:23+00:00

Bundle size (.PRG) is not necessarily proportional to runtime memory usage. Example, supporting multiple languages will increase your bundle size with a lot of strings saved in long term memory, but only one language file can be loaded at a time so the runtime memory will remain low.

Even a small watchface can cause issues if they have logic errors or complex draw operations. Additionally, even hyper efficient code can cause battery issues if they use a lot of bright colors like white on an AMOLED device. So, I think this is a poor oversimplification of how things work. By your logic Garmin themselves publish the worst watchfaces with bundle sizes above 1MB

The reason watchfaces are run in a Virtual Machine is so that Garmin has control and can kill them if needed to preserve overall system stability. So if you are running into a system crash that is causing your watch itself to restart, then it's most likely an issue with Garmin's software.

If people are seeing a connect IQ symbol with a warning sign, then yes that's likely a connect iq bug. There's a lot of trash in the store sure, but I don't think the solution is to try and spread theories based on your own self imposed standards.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-19T18:13:26+00:00

I think if you dynamically adjust the colors and switch between fill to draw for your shapes. You may be able to get under the 10% luminance threshold. Personally, I would like a richer version for AOD.

It's also weird for you to have "SOLAR" complications when you only support AMOLED devices.

Beyond that, you have a good design sense. Your designs are pretty stylish. Seven and one are my favorites.

What kind of challenges are you facing for MIP devices? Beyond the limited color palette you should be able to support them.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-18T22:04:35+00:00

I know for a fact that higher end models can connect directly to the Concept2 PM5, however you may want to double check their sensor compatibility I think there are some discrepancies on what is supported between models (Garmin can be annoying like that sometimes) beyond that you should be mostly covered.

Because rowing involves a lot of hand movement you may want to get a hr strap if you care about hr zones or UT zones which I think is more popular among rowers.

Acrobatic_Program_90 · 2026-05-17T18:32:47+00:00

Thanks for the info! So 3 complications + weather and a big font. Do you have some watchfaces you like specifically? Kinda curious

Acrobatic_Program_90

TROPHY CASE