Picking up a Garmin wearable is no small feat. Not just because each is designed to tackle vastly different sports and exercises, but because their prices can reach as high as R30,000+ if you like to keep on top of things. So the news that a specific bug has plagued users for months now, crashing their wearables at the most inopportune moments can’t be easy to hear. It won’t make it any easier once we tell you the bug has even spread to the Fenix 8.
Time to play the waiting game
And no, Garmin has not yet put out a fix, despite users reporting the issue for months according to Tech-Issues Today. The glitch isn’t one you can chalk up to a minor annoyance either, with many reporting their watch freezing up, displaying nothing more than an “IQ!” logo, and forcing a full restart to return to normal. The glitch is seemingly random too, interrupting activities and introducing another layer of frustration to the proceedings.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a definitive list of the affected Garmin devices. According to this Garmin forum post, the issue – supposedly caused by a glitch within Garmin’s Connect IQ platform (the Storage.setValue() function) – was introduced in versions 11.16 and 20.29, for the Fenix 7/8, Venu 3, and the Forerunners 265/295 at least. Garmin is aware of the issue and is working on a fix, it said. That was… 28 days ago.
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Even Garmin’s developers have struggled to reproduce the glitch consistently, leading to a longer-than-usual wait time for the fix to be rooted out and squashed. While users await a fix, the issue is just as frustrating for app developers within the ecosystem too, with one noting over 400,000 crashes concerning this bug throughout August. At the moment, you’ll have to rely on soft restarts to keep you going.
To soft restart your Fenix, Forerunner, or vívoactive watch, press and hold the power button for 30 seconds before tapping the power button again to turn it back on. You should note that some step data or any unsaved activity data may be lost as a result, although your custom settings and watch faces should be unaffected.