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 all most of its dependencies.

How to Use

First off, you do still need to make one small update to your OS as root 😞

Create a symlink from the old (expected) webkit2gtk-4.0 path to point to the newer webkit2gtk-4.1 path:

sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 # if not already installed.
sudo ln -sf webkit2gtk-4.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/webkit2gtk-4.0

Important

Although the code in this repository is freely usable under the highly-permissive MIT license, the wrapped SDK Manager is subject to Garmin's own Connect IQ SDK license, so please be sure to accept that license before using this AppImage.

Once the symlink is in place, simply download the latest AppImage from the releases page, unzip, and run 🎉

wget 'https://github.com/pcolby/connectiq-sdk-manager/releases/download/v0.1.0/connectiq-sdk-manager-1.0.13+50.AppImage.zip'
unzip connectiq-sdk-manager-1.0.13+50.AppImage.zip
./Connect_IQ_SDK_Manager-*-x86_64.AppImage

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.

Unfortunately that is not quite enough, hence the symlink mentioned above. The reason is that first time you run the the SDK Manager, it will present a Connect IQ License Agreement dialog, which you must accept before proceding. This dialog uses a webkit instance to render, and so the libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37 library tries to invoke /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/webkit2gtk-4.0/WebKitNetworkProcess, which of course, does not exist, and cannot be simply included in the AppImage. However, if you have the newer libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 installed, then you can simply symlink the old path to the new one, and then invocation works just fine.

Interestingly, once you've accepted the terms, and logged in to Garmin (via the SDK Manager), the symlink does not appear to needed any more, and you can probaby safely remove it again. Though there's no real harm leaving it there either.