Contact Earthmate Support

by R A User

The Bluetooth connection to the InReach device is dropped by the app, not the phone, very frequently. Typically a connection is maintained for less than 1 hour. Sometimes less than 15 minutes. Best workaround so far is to turn Bluetooth on the phone off and on periodically and before sending a text. The problem with this is that it sometimes results in duplicate messages being sent. That can get expensive. Also, turning Bluetooth off and on is a bad hack at best. I reported this problem to Garmin several times. Most recently 3 months ago. They almost seem to be taking it seriously this time, but no real progress. No useful suggestions from Garmin. I think this is a stop-ship bug. They seem to see it is a way to increase revenue by charging for duplicate messages. I have met many other InReach users experiencing the same problem. None had any good ideas for a work around. This problem has been consistent for me across two iPhones and several releases of iOS. I doubt it is any of user error, my phone or iOS.

by Ron34556

The only reason I even have this app is that it works well for messaging while Bluetooth tethered with my inreach. Tracking works ok tethered to the inreach but creating routes and waypoints and syncing to other devices or to the Garmin website is about as unintuitive as it gets. Importing and exporting gpx files is the worst. I have so many problems I would not know where to begin. I know you can do these things but it’s always a major pain. It might be that my go to apps, Gaia and Avenza, are just so much easier to use for creating routes/tracks or importing/exporting routes/tracks. The inreach is an indispensable tool for outdoor adventures and I love it for the peace of mind it gives me for emergencies and the ability to communicate with friends and family while I’m in the backcountry. It’s a good thing for Garmin that they offer the inreach because if Garmin had to rely just on the Earthmate app, they could never stand up to the competition.

by Kielhalen

The Garmin Earthmate app is no longer being updated and lacks even basic features like exporting tracks.
The InReach+ device itself would be ok, but you are forced to use Garmin’s idiotic website to manage and download data. The website is poorly designed and broken most of the the time. For example exporting tracks to .gpx files has not worked for a long time. And Garmin’s help website is useless because the help pages do not actually provide descriptive information for topics covered. You can check out the useless help website to see for yourself.
This product is a great example of what happens when a reasonable piece of hardware ends up being garbage because the company is too myopic to develop good software to support the device (and instead hires temp “script kiddies” to run a stupid website). Sad, very sad.