I have a Pebble watch that I got from their Kickstarter campaign. It’s great, it takes notifications from my phone whether iOS or Android and displays them on the watch. What it doesn’t do is much of anything to do with fitness. Well, that’s not quite right because I know Runkeeper works with it by displaying time and distance. But even though the Pebble has an accelerometer, there isn’t much in the way of step counting and all that stuff those kids are into these days with their FitBits and Nike Fuelbands. There are apps for the Pebble that try to fill that role, but most of them are junk. The most promising one is On11. Qian He has done an admirable job. The app tracks sleep, steps, running, and sitting. And the little rabbit mascot is pretty damned cute. But even On11 isn’t quite there. I don’t know if it’s the quality or sensitivity of the Pebble accelerometer, the lack of gyroscope, or if On11’s algorithms need to be tweaked, but it’s not all that accurate on steps and thinks I’m sleeping when I sit at the desk (I would think a gyroscope would help with that one). So when Samsung announced the Gear Fit, it looked like it would fit the bill. It has notifications, counts steps, and tracks exercises such as running or cycling. I have a shelf full of Garmin devices for both running and cycling, so I didn’t care all that much about those features. But I did want notifications and all-day step counting. Sold!

The Gear Fit arrived, and it’s a good thing that all I wanted was step counting and notifications because that’s all the Gear Fit can even reasonably do in a competent manner. The rest of the features are so incredibly, abysmally, and fundamentally broken that the only way to describe it is that it doesn’t remotely work as demonstrated in Samsung’s announcement. I’ll say it again: the Samsung Gear Fit does not work as it is advertised to do. I’m not exaggerating by saying that features that work in a somewhat flakey manner are “broken”. No, I mean the shit just plain doesn’t work.

To head off the obvious question of “why don’t you just send it back?”, I remind you, dear reader, that all I really wanted was notifications and step counting. The step counting is probably a little optimistic, but the notifications are pretty solid. In fact, the notification features improve on the Pebble somewhat because I can delete items from the watch, which the Pebble can’t do. So the Gear Fit does what I bought it to do. But if I thought I’d hold off on that Garmin 620 purchase and get a Gear Fit instead, it would have been boxed up and sent back two days after I bought it.

I test and develop software for a living. I’ve been doing it for almost 30 years. It has been rare that I have seen such amazingly broken software released to the general public, with the company asking that people pay for it. Lotus Notes? Yeah, it had its issues but it mostly worked. Microsoft Windows is a popular whipping boy, but admit it, it usually does what you want it to do. Even my beloved Garmin devices have bugs, just go scan the Garmin forums for evidence. But, man, at least my Garmins don’t just up and quit tracking my workout halfway in. Garmin’s bugs are amateur hour in comparison to the professional-level brokenness that Samsung has released on an unsuspecting public. As you will find out as the days and posts progress, it takes some serious balls on some project manager somewhere to ignore the development team when they say there’s no way they’ll finish on time, to ignore the test team when they say the product is fundamentally broken, and to ignore the program managers when they say the unresolved Pri 1 bug count is in the triple digits. And then to ask $200 United States dollars for the privilege? That’s some industrial-strength, clank-when-you-walk, cast-in-solid-bronze testicles right there.

Each and every single day I will write a bug about something that doesn’t work. No, I’m not talking bullshit bugs like “text overflows the textbox on localized German when user has enabled large fonts and the screen is in landscape”. Oh, no, I’ve been testing software too long to waste your time with such trivial things. Each bug will be on the level of “I went to use this feature and it didn’t do anything close to what I thought it would do. In fact, it didn’t do anything at all.” To be more specific, “I thought I’d use the Gear Fit to record my bicycle ride to work, and it didn’t record my goddamned workout.”

A bug every day, until I run out. Well, at least until I have to start dipping into localized German bugs with large fonts. Worry not, just off the top of my head I’ve got a month’s worth. I shit you not, I could sit down with you right now without any preparation and show you 30 things that just plain don’t work. Depending on how I break them out, I’ll bet I’m good for a year.

Why do it? Because at first it was annoyance that features I was never going to use anyway (that’s what Garmins are for) didn’t work. But the more I experimented with features I was never going to seriously use, the more it became evident no one else was going to use those features, either, because (say it with me) they don’t work. So then it became a bug hunt. Once it was obvious that this “bug hunt” was about as much of a hunt as releasing wild animals into a fenced area for rich people to shoot (which is a real thing, BTW. Feel free to mock the mighty “hunters”.), I figured I should write this down. And here we are.