ConnectStats has been alive for over 15 years now. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an iOS app I built for runners, cyclists, and triathletes who want to actually understand their training data from Garmin and Strava. Not just see it, but dig into it — compare seasons, plot trends over years, find patterns in heart rate zones and pace distributions that the official apps don’t surface.

I’m proud of the app. Users have been generous with their feedback over the years, and some have become friends. But I’ll be honest: between work and life and picking up flying as a hobby, ConnectStats had quietly slipped into maintenance mode. And then maintenance mode slipped into no-maintenance mode. For roughly five years, I barely touched the code. I’d occasionally check that things were still working, but no releases, no bug fixes, no features.

And somehow — five years of nothing — it just kept working. Users kept downloading it, kept using it, kept sending me the occasional kind email. A fifteen-year-old app, running on a codebase I hadn’t updated in half a decade, quietly doing its job. I’ll admit: I was both pleased and slightly amazed.

Then, inevitably, it broke.

The number of ConnectStats users has dropped quite a bit over the years, but about a week ago I started seeing messages on the blog that it had stopped working.

Short version: it works again.

The last time I touched the ConnectStats server was four years and eight months ago (confirmed by my version control history). So when I saw those messages, I panicked — I genuinely didn’t remember how most of it worked. But here’s the thing: over the last few months I’ve fully embraced AI-assisted programming, first with Cursor and now especially my favorite tool, Claude Code.

So while I started looking at my old code and immediately felt overwhelmed, I asked Claude to look at the app code, the server code, and fed it the Garmin documentation for good measure. Within minutes it could walk me through the login workflow, tell me where to set breakpoints to understand the failure, and before long we’d pinpointed the issue: a disk on my server had filled up.

Claude then wrote a script to clean up inactive users — the kind of tedious, nerve-wracking maintenance task I’d been putting off for years. Disk space reclaimed, everything back online.

Even better, Claude now understands the full codebase and has suggested a bunch of cleanup improvements. I might actually start adding features again.

So the core issue with the app is now solved. That said the API changes means a few things won’t work anymore.

Garmin asked people to stop using the information that comes from Garmin Connect and their website. It means that the following can’t be accessed by ConnectStats:

I pushed earlier this week version 8.0.1 which fixes the issue for Garmin and Strava for most users.

I have received a few messages about people still having an issue and will try to investigate and sort it out.

I want to thank all of you who send me encouraging messages and who seem to really like the app. That helps a lot keep the motivation to maintain it. Also a few people asked if they could pay something to help maintain the app. To be honest, maintaining the app is not a big monetary drain, but the very scare resource is time, I am just too busy between work and life to spend the time the app deserve to be properly maintained. But I will try my best to do do it.

I apologise to all of you who wrote me, who I didn’t manage to reply with a personalised message.

Once I figure out remaining issue I’ll post more here.

Quick update, I am working on a fix for the API change. The version 8.0 is intended to disable the failing API for Garmin but it seem to have broken Strava for some users.

I am currently unable to reproduce myself the Strava issue, so first thing I suggest is go to settings and tap on Logout and then login again, it should clear some of the connection cache and it may get it working again, else send me a bug report again saying you have tried to logout and back.

Garmin made a change to their API disabling the method by which ConnectStats was accessing historical activities before the first install of the app.

If you have the app already installed and the history downloaded it should mostly continue to work.

If this is your first install, you currently only will see new activities recorded after the app was installed.

IMPORTANT: make sure if you use Garmin that your source is set to ConnectStats only.

Fixing this require quite a big change in the code, and it will take some time. I am also unfortunately quite busy so people will have to be patient, and I hope I will find the time to do this. It is of course frustrating, because it will take a while to just implement something that will bring it back to its original functionality…

If anyone is a computer/php programmer with a keen interest in helping, please reach out to me. The app is open source, free, no advertisement and its data is kept private to you and not sold or shared anywhere. It would really help me if someone sharing the same hobby was interested in helping me fix it, maintain it and even enhance.

Meanwhile, I hope this does not mean the end of Connectstats, the app has been alive for now 12 years or so, it would sadden me to have to turn it off.

So as the activity, or lack thereof, on this site shows, I have not been very active on the app development front. I could barely remember the password access this web site! good that safari remembers it for me!

I don’t really have any good reason or excuse, I have just been a bit lazy and distracted with other interests to spend my free time on. After 2020, my best ever running year in, 2021 was my worse and 2022 does not start great. ConnectStats development kind of follows my running activities as I tend to work on it as I see new needs to analyse my running. I am hoping that working on the app will have the reverse effect and make me go out and run to try out new features 🙂

So I am releasing a new (and first of 2022) version of ConnectStats (7.2) with mostly two new features, at the request of users.

ConnectStats got its first release in a while this week. It now supports notifications. This is currently not enabled by default, you’ll need to enable it explicitly in the services configuration page for Garmin.

The notification only works if your source of activity include Garmin and ConnectStats as a source. It is not possible to get notification into connectstats if you use Strava as a service.

ConnectStats 6.8 comes with significant rework of the statistics and calendar page. The main new feature is the ability to compare the numbers between weeks, months or years. Let’s dive in.

First, this new feature needs to be activated by switching to the new theme 2021 in config if you haven’t already. Because it’s still has some quirks, this is not yet the default, but it’s likely within one or more release, I’ll make it the main default theme.

As of last night, February 23rd, the Garmin service changed and now ConnectStats receives Service Logic Error as Garmin is rejecting the current approach ConnectStats uses to access the Garmin web page information.

I am pushing a new version that fixes the issue, hopefully will be approved soon by apple,

As explained here, you can still access your activities by making sure you use the ConnectStats service, which is still working. For that follow instruction in the link and make sure you select for Garmin Source “All” or “ConnectStats”. This should let you access new activities properly.

Please note that if you enable the connectstats service for the first time or if you are a new user of the app, you will not get any activities prior to you registering for the service, as Garmin only sends new activities after you registered. I’ll see how to improve that or write about how to work around it later.

I’ll update further when I have time to properly investigate and see if there can be a workaround.

Sorry for any inconvenience, please check here again later for updates