If your Garmin watch faces keep crashing, you’re not alone – and Garmin is working on it
- Garmin users have been seeing crashes for months
- A faulty firmware update is believed to be the cause
- Garmin says a fix is coming, but we don’t know when
Buy one of the best Garmin watches on the market and you could reasonably expect to have many years of trouble-free computing on your wrist, but it seems that many Garmin users are currently experiencing issues with crashing watch faces.
According to Technical problems today And Android PoliceThese issues have plagued users for months but have recently spread to more Garmin models. The random crashes apparently cause an “IQ” logo to appear on the screen with an orange exclamation mark, and then the watch stops working.
The Garmin Venu 3 and Garmin Forerunner 965 models are specifically mentioned, but it appears that no watch is safe. Based on the multiple messages that can be found on Reddit and the official Garmin Forumsit appears this is now affecting a significant number of users.
According to the user reports, the general consensus is that a buggy firmware update is the cause. It sounds like it breaks the method used by the Connect IQ platform to store data, causing the smartwatch to crash.
There will be a solution
If this is bothering you, all you can do for now is restart your watch. This won’t fix the problem permanently and you may experience persistent crashes afterwards, but there is no other option at the moment.
One bit of good news is that Garmin is aware of what’s going on and is trying to do something about it, according to a response to one of the complaints on Reddit. For now, we don’t have any timeline on when an updated firmware version might arrive – leaving users in a rather frustrating no man’s land.
It’s also a case of better late than never: one developer has apparently recorded hundreds of thousands of crashes in its app since August. That’s a lot of annoying people using Garmin watches and trying to save their fitness data to the watch, but it fails and requires a restart.
We’ve been consistently impressed with Garmin watches over the years, and they regularly make our list of the best smartwatches out there – but these are the kinds of problems that shouldn’t happen.
