I wrote the following about a year ago when I first got my TacX. I have struck out the items that no longer apply.
The TacX App is a joke. It barely does what it needs to do.
Here we are, a year later, and I’m inspired to write again.
Garmin finally got around to integrating their account with TacX. TacX is still, for some reason, a separate web site, but it now uses the same authentication provider as Garmin Connect.
The procedure of transferring to the new system was, as expected for Garmin, smooth and intuitive and painless.
Now, for whatever reason, the (again, from my notes) “stupid cunt of a thing doesn’t show up as bluetooth device”. For whatever reason, the trainer was no longer recognized by TacX. It “needed a fucking device reboot to recognize the cunting thing again”[2].
I was forced to reboot the laptop completely in order to get the device back in TacX (boundless joy, as I’d wanted to have been working out on the trainer for ten minutes already and was, instead, doing software support for a device that literally has one job and for a company that also pretty much has just one job and fails to be able to do it adequately, to say nothing of well, year after year after year).
On reboot, I see that the TacX trainer is “special” in that it is connected via BlueTooth but doesn’t show up as a connected BlueTooth device in MacOS. I’m sure this is totally standard and not at all indicative of hacks built on hacks in the TacX software.
After having nicely elevated both my heart rate and blood pressure, I was actually able to get a workout in and moved on to the “save activity” part of the competition.
To say that the software has timing issues is an understatement.
Garmin is a huge software company with literally a single web site to run. They bought a competitor in February 2019 and, almost two years later, have finally integrated the authentication. They have not managed to integrate the web sites, though. What they did manage was to bring their special “Garmin Cloud-expertise polish” to the TacX site. Unbelievable though it may seem, it’s now even worse and more stunted than it used to be.
The TacX app itself is unchanged and feels like someone made a desktop app out of an iPad app. It doesn’t remember any selections. It takes five clicks to do anything.
To end on an upbeat note: you can now only export from TacX to Garmin (Strava export as well “Save TCX” have been removed). However, the sync works as expected and the Garmin activity now takes the name of the TacX activity, by default. I know, right? As if that weren’t already enough engineering prowess, they’ve also changed the default activity type to “Indoor Cycling” (it used to be “Cycling”). It’s like a Christmas miracle.