Name: Outdoor Swim
Rating: 3.8 (77 reviews)
Author: horty.nz

Some lower end Garmin watches don't include an app for swimming with GPS. I suspect the reason is that the GPS hardware is less strong and the track in shallow water is too random.

I am now doing triathlons, and don't want to spend $$$ on a top of the line watch, so instead I built this app to add GPS to swimming. I have also added stroke cadence based on arm movement.

I have a vivoactive4, and sure enough the tracking is quite random, and the distance moderately over-estimated, around 20%. There are some big tracking jumps too which is unhelpful but not surprising.

I have experimented with options to smooth the tracking on the fly (e.g. using a separate FIT field, and restricting the GPS to providing occasional or user requested (waypoint) positioning), but the Garmin APIs are quite restrictive, so each alternative solution has too many limitations and weaknesses to be worthwhile.

One option I intend to pursue is to add a service to post-process the FIT files automatically on Connect IQ, as I think that will give me the most flexibility and hence be the best solution. However, this will require access to the Garmin program for developing apps that interact with their FIT data, which I understand is not that easy to get. So don't hold your breath on that one. I think it's better to have some indication of distance rather than none.

Until then, I offer this as a free app for you to check out. I had limited time to put into this and only one watch to test on, and was doing it primarily for my own personal use, so your mileage may vary on other watches. In particular, I built it so it looks nice and interacts well on a vivoactive4, which has a round screen and two buttons on the RHS (Enter and Escape). Interaction is simple - Enter to start and stop the activity recording, then Enter to save and Esc to discard. Touch is ignored - I've read of issues with false positives around water. The four field display is custom coded, and user selectable standard fields are not possible sorry as there's no API support for them.

SO, please treat it as a beta product, and observe the 'no dumbass' rule of feedback. I'm very happy for you to use the Contact Developer if it doesn't work well on your watch, and I will seek to resolve any issues with you, particularly any crashes (should be stable but ymmv) and screen or input issues, and also happily consider suggestions.  Please ensure your email address is entered and valid as that's the only way I could contact you!

Outdoor Swim

一些低端 Garmin 手表不包含带 GPS 的游泳应用程序。我怀疑原因是 GPS 硬件不够强大，浅水中的轨迹太随机。

我现在正在参加铁人三项比赛，不想花大价钱买一款顶级手表，所以我开发了这个应用程序来为游泳添加 GPS。我还添加了基于手臂运动的划水节奏。

我有一款 vivoactive4，果然跟踪非常随机，距离被适当高估了，大约 20%。还有一些大的跟踪跳跃，这没什么帮助，但并不奇怪。

我尝试过各种选项来平滑动态跟踪（例如，使用单独的 FIT 字段，并限制 GPS 以提供偶尔或用户请求的（航点）定位），但 Garmin API 非常严格，因此每个替代解决方案都有太多限制和弱点，不值得一试。

我打算采用的一个方案是添加一项服务，在 Connect IQ 上自动对 FIT 文件进行后期处理，因为我认为这将为我提供最大的灵活性，因此是最好的解决方案。但是，这需要访问 Garmin 程序，以开发与其 FIT 数据交互的应用程序，我知道这并不容易获得。所以不要对此抱有太大希望。我认为有距离指示总比没有要好。

在此之前，我将其作为免费应用程序提供给您查看。我投入的时间有限，只有一块手表可以测试，而且主要是为了我自己的个人使用，所以您在其他手表上的里程可能会有所不同。特别是，我设计它是为了让它看起来很漂亮，并且可以很好地与 vivoactive4 交互，它有一个圆形屏幕，右侧有两个按钮（Enter 和 Esc）。交互很简单 - Enter 开始和停止活动记录，然后 Enter 保存，Esc 放弃。触摸被忽略 - 我读过关于水周围误报的问题。四个字段显示是自定义编码的，用户可选择的标准字段无法使用，很抱歉，因为没有 API 支持它们。

因此，请将其视为测试版产品，并遵守“不傻”的反馈规则。如果联系开发人员在您的手表上运行不佳，我非常乐意为您使用，我将努力解决您的任何问题，特别是任何崩溃（应该是稳定的，但 ymmv）和屏幕或输入问题，也很乐意考虑您的建议。请确保您的电子邮件地址已输入且有效，因为这是我联系您的唯一方式！