Following the Garmin outage, someone asked me on twitter about some usage statistics and its evolution over time. I thought it would be a good idea to put together a little write up both on the stats but also to show people what type of usage data one can see when you have an app.

ConnectStats remains a very tiny player compared to the big guys, and its two key statistics is that in the recent month the app got about 5,000 downloads and on average 3,000 users start the app every day with some variation between weekend and weekdays. This is quite a representative month.

Garmin Servers were out from Thursday July 23rd to Monday July 27th. I won’t go over what happened at Garmin as it’s well covered in the press or other sites, but wanted to share how it impacted me and ConnectStats. While the impact on ConnectStats wasn’t massive, the episode resulted in two small fixes and improvements…

The discovery

First, it happened that on a Thursday when I didn’t go out running. So I didn’t realise until Friday, after the Garmin Connect App didn’t upload my latest morning run. The app was reporting some maintenance, which I didn’t worry about too much. I just opened ConnectStats, to see how the app was handling the maintenance, it reported a Garmin Error and invalid name or password if you tried to use the Garmin Website connection. Not great, but it’s hard sometime to interpret the web page errors. Mental note to check again later see if could interpret the message better, and I went to work.

I was just cleaning my files and stumbled across my old source code repository and looked at the first code commit of ConnectStats in September 2012…

ConnectStats and other apps have come a long way since then. The original reason I wrote ConnectStats are no longer valid, but today I still use it and feel the need to maintain it. I’ll go through how I use it, where I think it still has an edge vs other apps and where the other apps provide features I need but will never implement in ConnectStats.

I personally use extensively the Strava App, the Garmin Connect App and ConnectStats. It is very possible there are other apps out there that do a terrific job that I don’t know, but this article is just about what I use myself.