Can a watch app put itself into a low power sleep mode, waiting on a button press?

Former Member
Former Member

The use case for this is an app that would be used while orienteering.

For those that don't know the word, orienteering is an activity that involves overland running from one checkpoint to another.  The key requirement here is that what I'd like to be able to do is have an app that runs the whole time I'm on the course, but is only woken up at each checkpoint, e.g. with a button press or tap on the watch face.

Is this possible?  Have the app pretty much put itself to sleep, turning off the screen so it's consuming almost no power, and then wake up on user input to perform some actions, after which it would go back to sleep until the next checkpoint is reached.

  • There's not really the concept of low power/sleep in a device app.  If you are recording, things keep being collected and written to the fit file.

     As far as the display, in a device app, onUpdate isn't called on a regular basis, and typically, a device app or widget uses something like a timer to have onUpdate() called by way of Ui.RequestUpdate().  You can do something like only call requestUpdate after a button press.