After 5 years, ConnectStats still has a lot of features to offer. There are still analysis I resort to ConnectStats to see: the month to month comparison of you best achieved heart rate, pace or power – hard to find on comparable apps, the comparison of activities, the deep dives into laps with gradient or scatter plots. I also still like the fact you can access, slice and display most numbers of your runs over time or for a given activity.

That said the app is clearly a lot less successful that it used to be. Why? I think there are a few factors.

First, I have been working on the app a lot less. I had less time to focus, but mostly, it’s hard to come up with new ideas that will make a difference in the app. It used to be that, thanks to feedback or my own analysis needs, there was always a list of new ideas to implement, which kept the app interesting for users over time. Today I don’t have a list of great ideas that would enhance the core functionality of the app, which is in-depth analytics of fitness activities. I have a few little gimmick ideas or customisation improvements that some user suggested, but nothing ground breaking.

Second, the big apps got so much better. I confess that I myself often use Strava when I just want a glance at my last activity. The social aspect is also nice and a key draw for me; but it is hard (and probably pointless) to implement in ConnectStats. Their user interface evolved a lot and look quite a lot nicer than ConnectStats. Improving that is also not simple, because the UI in ConnectStats is data driven in quite generic way. Customising the UI isn’t part of ConnectStats design.

Last and not least, the discoverability of the app has reduced a lot. ConnectStats used to appear at the top of the App Store search for Garmin Connect, just below Garmin’s own. Not anymore. First people can now pay to be first, second the App Store ranking process has changed and now ConnectStats appears quite low on the search. I don’t know what changed, but it definitely hurts the visibility of an independent app. I never advertised in the past. So search ranking in the store was the key reason I believe the app was successful, given it always had a lot of positive reviews. As I felt somewhat sad at the drop in popularity of the app last week, I did something I had always refused to do: I paid to promote the app. One week promotion on facebook, just because it was easy and facebook had emailed me to suggest it. I paid 2GBP per day for a week. It clearly had little impact. A dozen like, Yay!. Clearly a bad use of money I won’t repeat…

I will see how the story evolves. I will continue to maintain ConnectStats. Part of it because it’s fun. I always look forward to June and the WWDC (apple developer event) when they announce the feature of the next iOS, study what feature can I try to incorporate into the app and learn details about what Apple provides developer with each year. The app is also now open source, so maybe it will help someone or someone will get new ideas to share with me.

But of course I secretly hope something will happen and ConnectStats will regain a second life…

The bad news: it seems the old Garmin API connect stats was using is no longer working for some people which results errors during download.

The good news is that I put in ConnectStats a way to access an alternative newer API that continues to work.

So if you get errors you should be able to fix it by going to the config screen, select services, garmin and turn alternative API on.

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.

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.

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.

I guess garmin is making a lot of changes to their API recently. The API I used for the laps is changed. I need to work on a new fix… I have pushed a temporary fix on the store.

While in previous week, some of the changes were subtle modification of the API. Here, ConnectStats is using some older Garmin API to get the laps, which now returns a message saying that this access point is disabled. For now I removed the laps download, because that’s easy and quick, but I need to also work on using a newer API for laps. I am also going to review all the old access point ConnectStats would be using and replace them with a newer one. This will be a subsequent release, and then the laps will come back. I am worried some of these older API point may also get disabled soon.

UPDATE: good news, it seems to be an slight API change, but not an attempts to stop 3rd party. So I could get it working again. Will push an update to the store as soon as possible.

It appears Garmin disabled access from ConnectStats again. As before I’ll remove the app from sales and turn off bug reporting until I can figure out the reason. I am sorry but at the moment I have very little time I can put into the app, so it may take a bit of time to get to the bottom of the issue. Also it is quite worrying that Garmin disabled it so soon, while it could be a coincidence and still a side effect of an API change, it’s also possible they just want to stop 3rd party app.

I will update when I can, sorry for the inconvenience.