[WD-42]

Be warned anyone that uses this - it uses Garth (https://github.com/matin/garth) to authenticate. It masquerades as an Android app (a single instance of one at that) and does some hacky stuff to login via web forms.

Garmin is such a horrible company to try to integrate with. I don't know why they lock down their stuff so hard like this. And if you do manage to gain access to one of their offical APIs or SDKs, they are total dogwater.

[fbnlsr]

I'm a Garmin user as I find the hardware to be very reliable but the market is in deep need of an Open Source alternative.

Let's not forget Garmin was victim of a ransomware attack in 2020 and they finally paid $10 million after days of blackout and they never really addressed the issue.

[mightysashiman]

An open source bike computer that isn't the price of a 2025 flagahip smartphone and the specs of a 2010 midrange smartphone! Please please!

[grokx]

I found this Raspberry Pi Zero based bike computer project: https://github.com/hishizuka/pizero_bikecomputer

This seems pretty nice in terms of features, but would probably need a bit of polish.

[PeterStuer]

We looked at this years ago and came to the (sad) conclusion that in this space there is no money to be made in hardware, the UX, while uniformly bad, can't make you profitable, so it's down to selling the user as a product once again.

[KennyBlanken]

Garmin has nothing on Strava. If you integrate with Strava and the user revokes the link, you have to delete all the data that came from Strava or you risk losing access to the API.

> I don't know why they lock down their stuff so hard like this.

Same reason every other company locks down your data. You are the product and they want to keep you locked in, feeding them data.

They can't have you running off with all your data when a new device comes out from a competitor that is better; that would force them to compete more!

Garmin has a long history of being lazy as fuck unless someone's actually competing against them. The smartwatch market heated up and lo and behold features and better models coming out left and right. Their bike computers would go years between refreshes..until Wahoo, Bryton, Coros, and Hammerhead started beating on their door.

Strava is much the same way. They were pretty free with access in and out, and tightened things down making it nearly impossible to export data.

[zimpenfish]

> If you integrate with Strava and the user revokes the link, you have to delete all the data that came from Strava or you risk losing access to the API.

That seems fair - the user has withdrawn their permission for processing their data or invoked "right to be forgotten", no?

[kawsper]

Strava also imposes limits on app developers, it doesn't matter if you have 1 user or 1 million users, and it was quite hard to get the limits increased.

You'd think they would allow a popular app that their customers likes to use could have higher limits.

CityStrides were battling with it a lot, but it looks like it was resolved, finally: https://community.citystrides.com/t/increase-strava-api-limi...

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Isn't that just following the law? User revoked their consent for you to have their data.

[foobarian]

> Garmin has a long history of being lazy as fuck unless someone's actually competing against them

Heh, isn't that pretty much every company in the history of capitalism?

[helsinkiandrew]

> Garmin is such a horrible company to try to integrate with

Is it still? A few years I built integration for creating posters from route GPS data, and it seemed pretty much the same experience as Strava and RunKeeper, but then they changed their TOC and wanted about $10K to connect.

It seems to be free now - although they still require approval. https://developer.garmin.com/gc-developer-program/overview/

If you want data for your own use - and to send data from one service to another - then tapiriik is great (or atleast was, I haven't used it for a few years):

https://tapiriik.com/

[AdamJacobMuller]

Very contrary to my experience.

I've been using InReach and the InReach APIs for a few years now.

They were both very reasonably priced (they cost nothing above my InReach subscription price), very easy to get access to (I emailed them and got access to API docs and the APIs within a day or three) and extremely well thought out and reliable (very robust callback based event/point reporting system, with retries on their side if your code breaks or is flakey, their web page has a great debug interface to see what happens if your webhook fails) and their support was top-notch (if not super fast).

I had a weird bug with their webhooks when I started implementation, where every event would come in twice, once with the timestamp of the event truncated to an integer of whole seconds. You could see from the user-agent that the one with the truncated timestamp was a few versions older of their software. Wrapped that analysis up in an email to them and about 12 hours later saw it get fixed and about 12 hours after that got an email back from AN ACTUAL ENGINEER who thanked me for the description, explained why and how it happened and explained their fix.

Granted, the InReach and definitely the InReach Professional API, are more of a professional product and less pure consumer, but, Garmin definitely knows how to do this.

[ianburrell]

Garmin acquire Delorme in 2016 including the inReach satellite communicators. I bet the development culture came with acquisition.

[mrbonner]

I think th consumer/retail side of Garmin company is a shit show. I recently ordered a HRM on Garmin website instead of other retail site. My order just sat at "ordered" status for over a week. I ended up just cancel and use Amazon.

[Johnny555]

I've run into that with most manufacturer retail sales departments -- it's almost always a better buying experience to use Amazon or another established online merchant.

It's expensive to build out a first class order fulfillment system and it's hard to compete with Amazon's system since they have such huge economies of scale -- Amazon probably ships more product in a few hours than Garmin does all year from their retail site.

Even worse than buying products from a manufacturer is buying a spare/replacement parts, you need a $5 replacement charging cord? Well it'll cost you $15 in shipping and still take 2 weeks, and often those spares are only available from the manufacturer.