It was 2pm and more than 1500 individuals were getting ready to start an international Orienteering event. To me it was opportunity to test my new BLE tool and at the same time, know more about the number of sports wearable’s people use nowadays – to know what to break next 🙂

So I positioned my crappy Android phone on the center of the event and just hit play.

After a couple of hours, I decided to check it out and I got a 701 devices detected – crazy number. Just by curiosity I made the Top5 brands and devices:

  1. Garmin – 542 devices
  2. Polar – 86 devices
  3. Fitbit – 28 devices
  4. TomTom – 21 devices
  5. Samsung – 17 devices

Around 77% of the devices detected were Garmin. Huge market share.

With that percentage, the Top5 devices were all Garmin:

  1. Forerunner 235 – 180 devices
  2. Forerunner 735 XT – 67 devices
  3. Forerunner 35 – 46 devices
  4. Forerunner 920 – 43 devices
  5. Fenix 3 HR – 30 devices

I already did some research on Garmin and TomTom, also played with someForerunner models and they show the real bd_addr (Bluetooth Address) which could be used to… track people. But this wasn’t the case.
My real goal was to test large data into my app and see how it handles on rendering them on a map. No information or connection was made to any device.

Just by curiosity, you know that only the Garmin watches had a value of around 180k?