Earlier this year, Garmin closed its Connect API developer program because it was being flooded with “AI”-generated applications to the point it couldn’t handle them anymore. What made it worse was that half of the applications were never actually used, not even once. It also didn’t help that Garmin treated every single application to the program the same way, whether it was from a hobbyist just wanting access to their own data, to a massive corporation developing a popular service used by god knows how many people.
Today, the company has relaunched the program, and it’s been considerably overhauled. While hobbyist use of the API is going to be free – which is way better than it was before – once you hit a thousand users, you’re going to have to start paying.
Still, Garmin’s shift here towards charging for API access will set a dangerous precedent for the industry. Especially for a company that bills itself as a (or the?) premium sports hardware provider. On the flip side, there’s simply no ignoring the flood of mostly AI apps that take up resources at Garmin and elsewhere to support. Heck, my inbox is flooded with these apps daily requesting reviews. It sounds like when Garmin shut off access to the API last spring, they were seeing inbound API requests at a daily scale that they’d previously only seen over a period of weeks. Simply put, there’s no good answer.
↫ Ray Maker at DC Rainmaker
The excesses of the easy availability of “AI” code generation impacts the entire industry. At least one good thing has come out of this: hobbyists can now access the Connect API developer program much easier than before.
So, this is good to have this type of acknowledgement of individuals wanting access to their own data programmatically for their own uses, this still means that you’re giving away all your data to a company, rather than capturing at the device (e.g. BT on my phone) without it ever hitting their servers. It’s a start, but it’s not enough IMO.
Even though Garmin is not nearly as bad, I have trust issues when it comes to such especially sensitive data with all tech/device companies.