I recently got a Garmin Smartwatch and I thought it would be interesting to get to know it as well from a development platform perspective. First, I tried to find resources and examples online to get a grasp of Garmin Connect IQ development. This is how my Awesome List Garmin Connect IQ started.

While searching for how to get started, I came across this post from 2018 from Joshua Miller which explains how to get started with Garmin Connect IQ development back then with Eclipse. It seemed simple so I was eager to create a simple Garmin Watchface myself. However, I wasn’t looking forward to install Eclipse …

To my pleasant surprise, while reading through the install steps on the Garmin IQ website, I found out that Eclipse is a thing of the past when talking about Garmin Connect IQ development. Now, everything is set up to work with Visual Studio Code. Event though I mostly work with Vim, this is ok for a small project, at least for starting with it.

I have to say, Garmin did a very good job on their documentation and developer experience! This means, my article is not really long.

1. Install VS Code
2. Walk through the “Getting started” page from Garmin
3. Walk through the “Your first app” page from Garmin

And then you already have a simulated watchface on your machine.

One final tip for getting started: The location on a Mac of the official samples from the SDK are here:

~/Library/Application Support/Garmin/ConnectIQ/Sdks/{YOUR_CURRENT_SDK}.