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0 pointsexabrial4y ago0 comments

Garmin was designed to work off grid and not need the internet lifeline to San Francisco or us-east. Can't say that about any of their competition.

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NoboruWataya4y ago

And yet when they got hit by ransomware a while back their mobile and web apps were rendered useless. You could neither add new activities, nor view old activities, nor sync with other apps.

You could of course access the .FIT files directly on your device via USB, so maybe that's what you meant. Their hardware is pretty good for working off grid but you need other software to do anything with the data it creates unless you're connected to their servers.

Riseed4y ago

> And yet when they got hit by ransomware a while back their mobile and web apps were rendered useless. You could neither add new activities, nor view old activities, nor sync with other apps.

Isn't that to be expected, if you're using their cloud services? The point is that Garmin is (or was, I've had my watch for a few years) designed in such a way that the cloud services are not a requirement for full use of the device.

Yes, you can access the .FIT files directly via USB and then sync with other apps, such as TurtleSport, GPXsee, etc.

NoboruWataya4y ago

> Isn't that to be expected, if you're using their cloud services?

For the most part, yes, though I don't think it is particularly unreasonable to expect that you could view some of your recent activities in the app without having to phone home, given how small the .FIT files tend to be.

Syncing with other apps is also something I would expect could be done without phoning home, assuming the other app is capable of parsing your .FIT file directly (which Strava is). In that case all the app needs to do is fetch the .FIT over Bluetooth and pass to the third party app using whatever phone API.

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NoboruWataya4y ago

And yet when they got hit by ransomware a while back their mobile and web apps were rendered useless. You could neither add new activities, nor view old activities, nor sync with other apps.

Riseed4y ago

> And yet when they got hit by ransomware a while back their mobile and web apps were rendered useless. You could neither add new activities, nor view old activities, nor sync with other apps.

Yes, you can access the .FIT files directly via USB and then sync with other apps, such as TurtleSport, GPXsee, etc.

NoboruWataya4y ago

> Isn't that to be expected, if you're using their cloud services?

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