I’m having a wee problem with the App on a Blackberry Keyone. When I scan for sensors, Speed (Garmin magnetless), Cadence (Garmin magnetless), HRM (Wahoo Tickr), and the Powermeter are found, and take under a minute (normally) for the App to say they’re connected. All of them ANT+. It takes on average 15-30 minutes before they will appear on either the Activity or Workout screens, which I assume is not normal. Power NEVER appears though, so I’m unable to complete workouts using the App. I have a Wahoo Elemnt head unit that connects to all the sensors so I can follow along, but it’s not what I want to do.
The remote player seems to flicker every so often as though it connects for a second and then forgets about it again.
Is this a known problem with connecting to a Powerpod, within the App itself, or with the Blackberry Keyone I’m running it on? FWIW I have the Powerpod dialed in for Road, TT and Track bikes as well as for use on both trainer and rollers, and his is the first time never not been able to connect to something,
This behaviour is not normal and hasn’t been reported before. Normally all ANT devices appear within seconds and if they use standard ANT sensor protocol, they’ll work perfectly with our app. Android platform does pose some issues with the wide variety of hardware in use. We are unable to test on all possible hardware, as you can imagine. Some have said that a reset of the phone often will bring up ANT devices. You may want to try that. If you have access to another Android, you can attempt to use that and see if the issue is due to the phone or whether some issues occur on these other devices.
Armando, by way of update: three days on and I have had to uninstall and reinstall the App each time I have wanted to use it. Once a workout is complete and I exit the App, it won’t display power the next time I go to connect. The other metrics are fine (they appear on the display) but despite the Scan page showing me the powermeter is connected it won’t display the numbers, and the graphical display has the same weird flicker. Thoughts? App, phone platform, Android software or powermeter? I see on the FB forum there’s been a couple of similar reports with different powermeters, Android and other phone versions.
We’ll have to try and find a way to replicate the issue here. Once you tap timer then EXIT, the ANT sensors should get released since the app just removes itself, including the background service. Is the background service still running by chance (slide down from the top to see if it is there). You’re saying that a reset of the phone doesn’t address this either which is really strange. There must be something in the app storage that might be causing the issue and it only pertains to your phone and/or sensors. Any help you can give us to try and replicate the issue would really help us find a way to address. Sorry for your trouble, btw.
Also, you may want to check on resources and remove other apps that are running. We’ve seen strange things where the background service is removed due to memory issues and the user facing app still runs.
Ah, ok. So the phone in that case is not exhibiting the correct behavior, because the ANT+ sensors are not getting released, and the App continues to run in the background. In fact ( and if I understand you correctly), when I open the App in my office (where I am now) and which is 25 miles from ANY bike sensors, they’re still showing as being connected, and they shouldn’t be? I can also see a total of 18 null BLE sensors…
I’ll reset the phone again and check on resources as you suggested and report back.
Armando, my update: last night did as you suggested - reset the phone, cleared App caches, and made sure the only thing running was the Xert App and the Android ANT+ radio apps required to connect to the sensors. I opened the App. It located speed cadence, HRM and power in the first 10 seconds after opening the App, as did my Elemnt (my control, so I knew the sensors were actually awake). Elemnt shows all metrics while pedaling. On the Xert App Cadence connected immediately. HRM at minute 5 and speed and power at minute 9 or so. Switch to Activity screen - none of the metrics are displayed. Press Start and New. Speed, Cadence and BPM are displayed after a further 3 or so minutes. No Power. I ended the activity, chose not to save, and restarted the App. More or less the same thing happened the second time, but this time power registered briefly before freezing at 210 watts about 2 minutes in, and while I was fiddling around trying to get the remote player working (it wasn’t). I attempted a third time to make everything work, but got pretty much the same result. With limit ed time available I cut my losses and just used the Elemnt to record what I was doing. Note this time I did not uninstall/reinstall the App. I know doing that works, but I’d like to be able to use it without doing that each time. So I’m a bit stumped. I’m going to put a Powertap wheel on my bike tonight and see if the same thing happens, and maybe switch out the sensors one-by-one. Is there a way I can send you the event logs that I’m not aware of, that might help diagnose this problem? Thanks.
Geoff. Thanks for your persistence. I doubt it will be related to the power meter. Are you able to try another app on the Android that uses the same ANT+ plugins/services? There could possibly be an issue there. If you have an old iPhone lying around, you can try our iOS app which we recently released. It works superbly even on an old 4S. Bluetooth only though.
Hi Armando. This morning the App worked perfectly. Without time to do anything else to my (work) phone where the App is, two things were different from before: it was 20 degrees colder in my garage, and I doubt that’s the issue; and my Garmin Vivosmart HR (that’s useful for monitoring sleep and overnight HR) completely discharged yesterday and disconnected from my phone and the Garmin Connect App. So far I have not been able to reconnect it. The remote player froze with around 37 minutes remaining of a SMART workout, and I had to logout and back in again to Xert on my Mac to get it back, and I’m guessing that’s my dodgy internet connection, but apart from that - no issues. Any idea if and why the Garmin Connect App or the watch, would be causing the issue? I’ll test again once I have managed to reconnect the device to the App.
Hard to say if GCM is the real cause. It is possible that it was consuming a lot of memory and when the Android starts running low on internal memory, it will start to shutdown apps that are running in the background like the Xert Service. If you’re indoors, you can also try and disable GPS (toggle “Record GPS” in the settings) which may also help reduce resource usage.
Armando here’s something. I have (or had), and App on my phone called “ANT+ Weight Scale Display”. It connects via ANT+ to my Tanita BC1000 body composition scale, and following a reading can sync with a bunch of services like SportTracks, Training Peaks etc. I went to use it for the first time in a while time morning and all the data was gone and it wouldn’t connect. It’s probably been that way since I first reset my phone to diagnose this problem. I left it alone and uninstalled it before this mornings workout. Xert working perfectly again, this time including the remote player. Connected everything in about 20 seconds. So, I think it’s less likely the Garmin Connect App than it probably is this one - which had always been a bit unstable. And it’s the only other thing on my phone that uses ANT+.