ConnectStats development continues…

Everything seems to be working again. ConnectStats survives another challenge and will continue its path for now. I want to thank everyone for the messages of support and positive comment on the app. It’s nice to see quite a few people still appreciate the app.

Quite a few comments talked about paying some extra fee to keep the maintenance of ConnectStats, it is appreciated but I do not do this for the money. This is a hobby, I have a day job that pays the bills. The revenue from such an app is very limited anyway. The small fee I charge for the app, is mostly to cover apple and other services fees and so I can buy guilt-free development tools or gadgets that I don’t really need, and justify it as needed to test or work on the app…

What is much more motivating for me is the support messages and continued positive feedback and reviews. So do not hesitate if you like the app to continue to review it positively on the store. If anything I am contemplating making ConnectStats an open source project, but I didn’t find the time to do the necessary refactoring and cleanup it would require to let others contribute.

A lot of the main apps provided by the big players are improving fast. We are a long way from the beginning of ConnectStats where I felt the urge to build an app as nothing provided the type of analysis I wanted. Garmin Connect is improving fast, and I really like the Strava app. I feel some of the feature I see added elsewhere are similar to some of the one built for ConnectStats offer some time back. I like to think, sometimes, that ConnectStats was a positive influence. Probably it’s presumptuous and they would have improved the apps anyway.

Where ConnectStats lacks quite behind is the aesthetics. I wish I had the time and the skills to make it look better, similar to Strava or the Withings app that I like quite a lot.

I thank everyone for the messages of support, and I’ll continue to do what I can to keep ConnectStats alive as long as possible.

Fixed and new version 3.6.1 on the way to the app store

So I managed to find some time and fix the parsing error problem this weekend. I have submitted the fix to apple, it usually takes a few days to make it to the store from here.

The API changed quite a bit, so was trickier than in the past, but the good news is that it got simplified quite a bit, so now my code to connect is much cleaner…

I know it can be a bit frustrating for connectstats users to have to live with regular issues related to log in into garmin, but let’s not forget that we need to be grateful that garmin continues to tolerate access to their API via connectstats. Their preference is for people to build a full back-end service and use their push API. This unfortunately would not be viable for a small app like connectstats, but too expensive to maintain and would take too much time for me to build. So thank you garmin for letting connectstats continue its
path.

I also want to apologise to ConnectStats users, as I have lately been extremely busy and didn’t do much new development or wasn’t very responsive to user requests. As some of you may know already, I do the app as side hobby, but have a quite busy day job. We are actually lucky, as if the outage had happened a few months ago, it would have been quite difficult for me to get the app back up and running. Beside keeping track with Garmin’s changes, a few month ago, apple made changes to its system that also broke connectstats and I was unable to push any fixes for a while. Luckily I had just resolved it a few weeks ago before the outage…

Hope connectstats despite these headwinds will continue to be available for a while.

 

Garmin connection issue again

 

As of this morning the API from garmin seem to have changed again, and connectstats can’t download activities from garmin any more. As usual when this happens, I have removed the app from sale and disabled the bug reporting while I investigate.

I will revert as soon as I figure out how to fix it.