Coros Will Work
In a note to current Coros GPS watch users and speaking with this site, Coros confirms that their watch and app continue to work together in a scenario where the cloud-based part of their infrastructure fails. Obviously, this was one of the ramifications of the recent Garmin debacle where Garmin watch users were still able to record workouts but could sync nothing back to either the Garmin app or web platform. Indeed there were further Garmin watch issues where some users couldn’t even record workout in scenarios where the watch held lots of past workouts because the app seemed to be needed to remove older workouts before new ones could be created. (More: here on this site as Garmin users ask “What data have iI lost?”)
Coros gives further reassurances telling us that their cloud-based platform is on a secure Amazon-based platform, as this message says
“To COROS users,
COROS uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the host of our cloud service. AWS is designed to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. It also has the most secure global infrastructure. All of your data is safely stored and automatically encrypted at the physical layer. In the event of a significant cyber-attack, our team is also confident in our ability to restore and recover the service within a few hours.
Your data and service security is our top priority and we will continue to improve and stay on top of this goal.
Team COROS”
It will be interesting to see which other vendors follow the lead of Coros to reassure us about our abilities to use their products if they mess up with their cloud platforms. Admittedly the Garmin Connect platform is a wee bit more complex than those of all of its competitors! then again, Garmin has more cash than them all put together as well as a reputation for (small ‘c’) conservative action.
https://the5krunner.com/2022/11/03/coros-apex-2-pro-review/
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The Suunto App allows you to sync your activities even without connection. It also allows you to send routes to your watch without connection.
thank you. I’ve already asked some other companies to clarify the exact nature of how their apps work if their cloud goes down
What about polar flow app ?
Flow syncs perfectly without an Internet connection.
Unfortunately no gpx upload to watch
It’s a bit rich for Coros to claim they totally wouldn’t have had a problem if they were targeted by Russian hackers and anyway if they did, their recovery would be fast. They don’t operate at remotely the same scale and complexity of products, services, and integrations. Possibly good marketing for them for kicking Garmin when they are down and trying to grow their business, but not to be taken too seriously.
I don’t think the fact that GCM is implemented as a thin client on the Garmin web services is particularly an issue. The larger issue is that their service architecture was revealed to be fragile and apparently tied up with their internal corporate network.
There are things that Garmin could do to be more resilient including better network segmentation so that the public services are totally independent from internal IT operations and using copy-on-write block storage (like ZFS) that inherently does not overwrite data and can quickly and easily roll back or read-only object storage. Either approach or both would protect against a cryptolocker attack as well as just being high reliability storage.
Also there are some stupid defaults in devices: like having a hard-coded limit of activities that can be stored regardless of available storage, only cleaning the old activities out during successful sync, and only leaving a handful of free slots. I lost data to that and it could easily happen during an expedition or road trip without Garmin having a service outage — just a few days without internet would trigger it.
I have never scrolled back more than a few days in the history on my watch. How about not keeping more than a month of activities there once they have been synced? How about discarding the oldest activity if the device is full so that you can record the current one, possibly with a prompt to the user? This particular issue seemed thoughtless.
yes, fair comment and a positive that will come out of this will possibly be some of the ‘stupid defaults’ you point out being rectified.
I did point out “Admittedly the Garmin Connect platform is a wee bit more complex” and the sense there is that people just want to be able to do their stuff on their smartphone. many probably wouldn’t have either noticed or cared about what happened to Garmin …if the app kept working.
Unfortunately Coros doesn’t support the Stryd pod.
What’s the best non-Garmin device that supports Stryd? Asking for a friend
I have used with Vanage a lot. The power zone lock is a good feature with STRYD
cheapest would be sigma but that’s very minimal support
Am hoping coros will get stryd support sooner rather than later.
Coros states on their website that they expect to support Stryd during this summer (https://support.coros.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040662191-Is-Stryd-compatible-with-COROS-watches-), so if that is even remotely accurate, I could wait for that. My FR735XT is getting long in the tooth, but it’s still working, so I can afford to wait.
Also wait to see if Garmin pulls their head out of their corporate behinds snd make the app do offline-first syncing (so watch syncs to App, App then syncs to GC. Similar with viewing).
yes, that announcement is what i am talking about. worth waiting for.
i would imagine for garmin to change to offline sync would be a major task
In order to implement this behavior they would either have to implement and maintain all of their fit file parsing and analytics on iOS and Android in addition to on their server platform. That is 3x the work and 3x the bug surface area for (virtually) no increase in features. It also means 3x the work to implement any new feature.
That is why I don’t really object to the thin client implementation of GCM. But in turn I do expect that Garmin devices will work offline for extended periods without a problem and there is an offline way to manage settings and data. That’s mostly the case except for the issue with the Activities directory filling up.
Now if — like a friend of mine — you have spent 6 figures on a Garmin avionics that grounded your plane because the map data could not update, I think you have good cause to be enraged.
“In the event of a significant cyber-attack, our team is also confident in our ability to restore and recover the service within a few hours.”
Restoring a backup is the easy part, figuring out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happing again can be hard in case of a sophisticated attack. This sounds a bit overconfident.