We pay the same sub fees as Wahoo owners. When will Zwift enable this for all users/trainers that are capable?
As I understand it’s in the hands of the trainer manufacturers- they need to enable the trainers to support virtual shifting. And while Wahoo were the first ones outside Zwift to support this they currently only support the Kickr v6, Kickr Move, and Kickr Core. Folks are waiting for months now for support on the v5 and v4.
IndieVelo supports virtual shifting on all trainers
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Ya, I know 
My trainer works great on the virtual shifting on Indievelo. Would be nice to do the same on zwift without having to buy a new trainer. If a one guy shop can do it, you’d think Zwift would be able to. Shrug.
this requires shifting with a keyboard?
Yes and no. They support various controllers it seems, i.e. xbox etc. But for myself I just use a bluetooth media controller on my handlebar and remap the volume up/down buttons to the +/- keys for the shifting (using Microsoft PowerToys). I was surprised how smooth it works. I use a Saris H3. I was on the verge of buying a kicker core but they dont ship the play controllers here so been in limbo on pulling the trigger. I’ll keep trying out indievelo for now I guess.
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I pay the same subs as wattbike atom users.
They get to see their gears on screen, as Kickr bike owner I don’t. Classic Zwift
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Thank you all for your enthusiasm. I’m Juan from Zwift. I understand how important it is to you that the virtual shifting feature is compatible with a wider variety of trainers.
There are a few things behind the scenes to reach more trainers brands. I’d like to encourage you to keep an eye on our official channels, any improvement in this regard would be released there.
Ride On.
Please make the Zwift Cog and Click available for sale worldwide then if you understand how important virtual shifting is.
You already have ERG mode working and obviously can control all trainers. There is no reason to not have this enabled for all of us except that you have probably given Wahoo some kind of agreed access timeframe. Ah well, guess I’ll come back once zwift get around to it.
There is zero technical reason why virtual shifting cannot be enabled on a far wider range of trainers than it is currently. We know because others (Indie-Velo) have done it.
Zwift have made a choice for now to deliberately provide a poorer experience for non-Wahoo product owners, and frankly it annoys me to be a pawn in a marketing/branding game between Zwift and other trainer manufacturers.
And you want me to pay an extra £5 per month for the privilege of you deliberately holding back features because I have “the wrong trainer”? I don’t think so.
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Then again, there is probably no technical reason why many things still need bug fixes or have been requested haven’t been done.
Another argument for leaving is certainly the high level of bugs and defects in the UI (not just functional bugs, but those indicating a lack of polish or poor attention to detail which are endemic).
But Virtual Shifting has been done and could be available now, unless there is something specifically unusual about each different trainer that requires a lot of work. Based on Indie-Velo I don’t believe that to be the case.
Probably two different approaches for the two different platforms, the Zwift one seems to need support in the individual trainer firmware (sounds unnecessarily complicated) while the indieVelo approach clearly does something more general, maybe it’s simply sending fake gradient simulation numbers to the trainer to achieve the desired effect. Meaning Zwift would certainly have to reimplement parts of the virtual shifting code for the general case, while others (e.g. UI stuff) can be reused.
Being able to use virtual gears simply via the keyboard (or a different input device pretending to be one) is btw pretty nice as well…
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I had overlooked the possibility that Zwift had done something other than “lie about the gradient/resistance” as a solution, particularly as they can already do erg mode and vary trainer resistance. That would just be so Zwiftian if they had done it the hard way.
Some explanation of how it works here:
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hi @Bakasan, i also have a saris h3 and i’m curious how you manage to achieve the virtual shifting in zwift. could you please elaborate? kind regards
They are using virtual shifting on Indievelo, not on Zwift.
Hi @Joao_Ferreira10 , when I was still using zwift I was able to to do virtual shifting with a 3rd party Android app. Basically your H3 pairs to it and your android device shows up as its own trainer that you connect zwift to. You can then also do things like use a 3rd party bluetooth volume control to change the gears. Give it a try, it should work for you. I have since moved on to Indievelo that supports it out of the box and I also use the above android app with Rouvy as well. The app is called qzfitness, they also have an Apple IOS version from what I can tell.
Thanks a lot. That’s going to be a game changer really. it’s awesome, i love the zwift cog and will still probably get it at some point, but just to test the virtual shift, it’s not even required.