Connect IQ SDK Manager AppImage

tl;dr Allows you to run Garmin's Connect IQ SDK Manager on modern Linux machines, such as Ubuntu 24.04 or later.

Why

The problem is that the proprietary SDK Manager has a runtime link dependency to an old webkit2gtk-4.0 library, which Ubuntu stopped shipping sometime before 24.04, but Garmin has still not updated the application to use a more recent version. Because SDK Manager is closed source, we cannot simply modify it. However, we can package it into an AppImage, along with most of its dependencies.

License

Important

The code in this repository is freely usable under the highly-permissive MIT license, however the packaged SDK Manager is subject to Garmin's Connect IQ SDK license, so please be sure to accept that license before using any of the AppImages from this project.

How to Use

There is a convenience script (install.sh) which can be used to download the latest AppImages and make them executable, which you can run like:

curl -Ls https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/main/install.sh | bash -r

Here's an example output:

Installing to: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages
Fetching details for release: latest
Found details for release: Continuous
Downloading Connect_IQ_+Monkey_Motion-4.2.4+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-4.2.4%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-4.2.4+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-6.4.2+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-6.4.2%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-6.4.2+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-7.4.3+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-7.4.3%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-7.4.3+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-8.1.1+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-8.1.1%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_Monkey_Motion-8.1.1+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading Connect_IQ_SDK_Manager-1.0.14+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_SDK_Manager-1.0.14%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_SDK_Manager-1.0.14+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading Connect_IQ_Simulator-4.2.4+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_Simulator-4.2.4%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_Simulator-4.2.4+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading Connect_IQ_Simulator-6.4.2+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_Simulator-6.4.2%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_Simulator-6.4.2+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading Connect_IQ_Simulator-7.4.3+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_Simulator-7.4.3%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_Simulator-7.4.3+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading Connect_IQ_Simulator-8.1.1+65-x86_64.AppImage
  src: https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/continuous/Connect_IQ_Simulator-8.1.1%2B65-x86_64.AppImage
  dst: /home/paul/.Garmin/ConnectIQ/AppImages/Connect_IQ_Simulator-8.1.1+65-x86_64.AppImage
######################################################################## 100.0%

Otherwise you can just download the relevant AppImage from the releases page, and make it executable yourself.

How it Works

If you were to download the SDK Manager from Garmin, and run it on a modern Ubuntu's, you will get an error like:

./bin/sdkmanager: error while loading shared libraries: libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Of course this is because sdkmanager has a link dependency on the libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37 library, which was replaced with libwebkit2gtk-4.1.so.0 sometime between Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04. The ideal fix would be for Garmin to release an updates SDK Manager (no doubt they will eventually), but in the meantime, we have this workaround.

So this workflow uses a slightly older Ubuntu 22.04 image, since it has the required older library, and the excellent linuxdeploy utility to bundle the SDK Manager, along with all of its link and resource dependencies into a single AppImage.

The resulting AppImage still has a runtime dependency on some webkit2gtk executables (they are executed by libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37 to render some HTML views, such as the initial "Connect IQ License Agreement" dialog), however a custom linuxdeploy plugin (linuxdeploy-plugin-webkitmod.sh) is modifies the libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37 library to run those binaries from a libwebkit2gtk-4.1 folder instead, so having libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 installed is sufficient.