Improvements for the Discard activity screen in Locus Map 4 Garmin on VA4(s)

Auric Goldfinger shared this idea 4 years ago
Gathering feedback

The LM4G app feels very stable and familiar during its operation on the new VA4(s), now that you can actually quit the app. During my test, I discovered some unnatural and potential frustrating behaviour. When solved, this app will be even more awesome than it is now.


  • ✘ In native activities, when swiping right, the watch face is brought up. When you wait for several seconds, the activity is activated again. When you swipe right in LM4G, the app is quit and returns to the apps list (when not recording), or shows the discard activity screen (when recording). Especially the behaviour during recording isn't expected.
  • ✘ Inconsistent behaviour for the discard activity screen or the pause activity screen:
    • When the discard confirmation screen is activated, it asks "Discard? Yes/No". When you choose Yes, the recording is discarded and the activity quits, as expected. When you choose No, the screen is dismissed and you arrive back into the activity which continues recording, which is expected as well.
    • When the discard confirmation pops up and you don't choose an option, after 30 seconds the app decides save the activity and quit. My expectation is that it behaves the same as when the user taps "no", returns to the activity and continues tracking.
    • When you press the upper button to pause the activity tracking, exactly the same happens: the activity is saved an the app quits. For both screens, that's a frustrating behaviour if you hit one of the buttons accidentally during an activity tracking (which happened to me before!)


  • In order to make the app even beter, I wanted to share this with you. Kind regards and keep up the good work :-)
  • Replies (5)

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    Interesting... I don't understand why VA4 behave like this. There isn't any 30s time-limit or related auto-action defined in the application. When you open menu of the app (with "settings" and "about") - it is also automatically closed after 30s? Thanks.

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    Facinating, indeed. It actually is, but not all those screens :-) Here's a list of the screens and their behaviour:

    Screens that are dismissed, auto-saving the activity (if any) and killing the app:

    • Long press lower button: "Menu" screen which has the options "Settings" and "About"
    • Short press lower button while in an activity: "Discard activity" screen
    • Short press upper button: "Choose activity" screen with "Walk", "hike", ... options
    • Short press upper button while in activity: Pause screen

    Screens that stay active forever:

    • The main screens (luckily), including the "Locus map is running in preview mode" splash screen
    • Long press the lower button: "Menu", then choose "Settings". That "Settings" screen stays active
    • The submenus of "Settings" ("Navigation", "Phone maps")
    • The "About" screen

    I didn't find any other screen :-)

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    Worse... I notice a huge battery drain when it happens. 1% every 5 minutes... I'll do some more tests today to find out when exactly

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    I can't reproduce this one anymore.

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    What firmware do you have in your watch? This is for sure issue on Garmin side. I believe also other apps will have similar issue if they use simple Menu (without toggles etc.). I will report this to Garmin.

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    latest firmware: 3.50

    I just tried with the build-in "swim" activity settings. After 30s, the menu was gone indeed!

    Then only the swipe-right issue remains ;-)

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    The issue was reported and is already tracked by Garmin. You can follow it here:

    https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/i/bug-reports/va4-va4s-kills-app-when-on-watchui-menu-view-after-few-seconds

    Auric, can you please repeat what do you mean by swipe-right issue? Don't see it described here. Thanks

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    It might be related, but this is the issue: In native activities, when swiping right, the watch face is brought up. When you wait for several seconds, the activity is activated again. When you swipe right in LM4G, the app is closed and the apps list is shown (when not recording), or the discard activity screen is shown (while recording).


    Expected is that the watch face is shown for several seconds while the activity keeps running in the background

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    Hi, thanks for this info. I am afraid that this is not currently possible to do from withing Connect IQ app on VA4, but I still want to try to do some more research on this. If you find any CIQ app which can do swipe-right to watchface, let me please know!

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