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Should there be a Wi-Fi Weather Capability for Watches?

8000292
over 3 years ago

Nokia 1112 is a mobile that I think to use for my entire life
 Garmin Fenix 6X  Pro is a watche that I use

You already could understand that I do not use Garmin Connect Mobile app, I use Garmin Connect Web & Garmin Express and synce the watche by Wi-FI
I do not experience much restraints in every day use, but it would have been very useful, if Weather Widget on my watch has ability to use wifi connection to get data

While searching for 'WiFi Weather Capability on Watches', I found that some Non-Wearable Garmin Producs as Garmin GPSMAP 66ST has functinality that I was looking for
Unfortunately I have not found similar functionality for watches, It seems that they get information only while being connected to the phone through the Garmin Connect app based on:
Frequently Asked Questions About the Weather Widget on My Garmin Device

I understand that not all watches have WIFi connectivity, but I could see that my watch has option to sync & set time by established WIFI, so why not have such option also for Weather Widget

I read that starting with 3.1SDK, REST API calls are possible over WIFI
But I can't find any weather widgets with such capability. Does anybody tried this or have more information? Should I hope for Wi-Fi Weather Capability for Watches?

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    As far as I understand, the call doesn't care (or need to know) what the connection is (either BT or WiFi).

    The apps might be verifying that the connection is available and only looking for BT.

    Verifying that the connection is available is (from my experience) a bit flaky. I have to have my app ask twice to know that I have a WiFi connection.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    WiFi on the watches works differently than on the handheld or edge devices.  The handhelds and Edge devices will turn on the WiFi any time the devices is turned on.  In the case of the Edge it will turn off the WiFi while recording an activity, but will turn it back on once the activity is saved.  On the watches, the WiFi only gets turned on for a couple specific cases.  So unless you manually force a sync over WiFi or go through specific steps to initiate the WiFi for a specific request, a general web request will not get a WiFi connection.  I looked into what was needed and determined for my radar widget, the overhead to utilize the WiFi on the watch was not worth it.  The time to turn on WiFi, wait for the connection then send the request, I could already have received all the info I was looking for over the BLE link.  The two devices that support LTE, can use that connection in place of a BT link without any specific code changes.  As Dpawlyk stated, the API will utilize any available active connection on the device.  

    I would not expect to see to many weather apps try to utilize the WiFi on the watch as the chance for WiFi to be connected is very low.