Several popular Garmin smartwatch models are crashing multiple times per month
A mystery has taken over the world of Garmin smartwatches. Several users report that their watch face crashes showing the "IQ!" error message with the exclamation mark colored orange. This odd bug has been affecting Garmin watch owners for months now on popular timepieces from Garmin such as the Venu 3, Forerunner 965, Fenix 7, and others. There appears to be no rhyme or reason as some say the crash occurs after receiving a notification while others say this issue occurs randomly during regular use.
The Garmin smartwatches crashing are running firmware versions 11.16, 20.29, and others cited in online forums.The issue could be related to a problem with Garmin's Connect IQ platform (CIQ), possibly the Storage.setValue() function. The latter is used by apps and watch faces to save data. Once the affected watch faces crash, other faces crash as well until the watch is restarted. But that doesn't permanently fix the problem as the watch will continue to crash and show the "IQ!" error message even after being shut down and turned back on.
"Originally I thought it was the battery. I think that it is the watchface integration with Garmin. It shuts down randomly, mostly at night. Now sometimes when I invoke an activity, after connecting with GPS and I press the start button on the VivoActive 4, it just shuts off. Recently, even after I hit a goal, like steps for the day, it just randomly shuts off. I tried a hard reboot while the watch was charging, I tried powering to full, etc... It was still happening. I just changed watch faces to see if that helps. I have had a Garmin watch since 2018. This is super frustrating."-Resthink, Reddit subscriber
This is not a small glitch. One app developer posted on Garmin's own forum that a single app has crashed 400,000 times since August. A Garmin engineer has reported in the same forum that the CIQ watch face source code has occasionally been the reason for the watch face to crash, but not only is it not the reason on a consistent basis, finding the conditions that cause the crash to find a fix for the issue has been "troublesome."
Example of the IQ! eeror message seen on some Garmin smartwatches. | Image credit-Garmin
On Reddit, a large number of Garmin smartwatch owners reported that they have been suffering with this issue for months. Hopefully, Garmin will be able to develop an update that will take care of this problem because a watch that is constantly crashing, especially a smartwatch, isn't good for anyone. For example, one Garmin customer who owns the F7X Pro Sapphire Solar says that his watch has crashed three times this month since he received the 19.34 update.
Another Garmin owner says that he has been seeing the IQ! error message frozen on the display of his Fennix 7 timepiece. He has been experiencing this issue one to two times per month.
Considering that this problem has been affecting Garmin users for as long as a couple of months, let's hope that an update exterminating this bug will be released soon.
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