A mysterious glitch is causing Garmin watches to crash; here’s what’s happening

In case you’ve invested in considered one of Garmin’s feature-packed smartwatches, you seemingly anticipated years of clean crusing. Nevertheless, over the previous few months, many Garmin customers have discovered themselves coping with a perplexing situation — random crashes that depart their watch faces frozen, displaying an ominous “IQ!” brand with an orange exclamation level.

First reported by Tech-Points At present, this downside has been quietly plaguing customers for months, however experiences recommend it’s spreading to much more Garmin fashions. And it’s not only one or two units — this bug has been noticed on in style fashions just like the Venu 3, Forerunner 965, Fenix 7, and others.

On the coronary heart of the issue probably is a glitch in Garmin’s Join IQ platform, particularly the Storage.setValue() perform, which apps and watch faces depend on to avoid wasting knowledge. When this perform acts up, it causes affected watch faces to crash.

The crashes don’t observe a predictable sample, making them much more irritating. Some customers report their watches failing after receiving notifications, whereas others expertise random interruptions throughout common use. Even restarting your smartwatch solely provides short-term aid, because the crashes usually return, typically impacting different watch faces as properly.

Person experiences throughout Reddit and Garmin boards hyperlink the problem to current firmware updates, together with variations 11.16 and 20.29, which appear to have triggered these crashes throughout a number of fashions. For builders, the bug has been nothing in need of a nightmare. One app creator reported almost 400,000 crashes of their app since August.

Garmin’s engineers have acknowledged the problem in response to person complaints. Nevertheless, they’ve talked about that constantly reproducing the issue has been a problem, which is hindering their investigation.

The state of affairs has left Garmin customers — and builders — understandably annoyed. For now, persistence is the one resolution as everybody waits for Garmin to roll out a repair. The corporate has a superb observe file of addressing points like these, so there’s hope that aid is on the horizon.