Trade-offs between Complication.value versus ActivityMonitor/SensorHistory classes

The complication and what you see in Activity.Info.currentHeartrate come from different sources in the sim.  With that sample you can pick a target, like the fr245 that doesn't support complications, and you'll see you have to start the simulation for that.

From my limited testing getting HR from a complication and ActivityInfo display the same values on my watch and update at basically the same rate. This is on a Venu2 when the view is in high power mode and updating once a second. In the simulator profiler getting it from the complication uses more resources than getting it from ActivityInfo. So, I'll just be using ActivityInfo as it's also less code and easier to use. I'm not sure I really see the benefit to using a complication here, since my watch doesn't support onPartialUpdate and I only really care about it when the view is active.

The advantage on using a complication is on touch devices that support them, you can add onPress() logic so when you press on something like Heart Rate, it launches the widget for that and you see much more detail.  Try it with the sample you are using on a real device.  In a sim, you just get a screen that says

Technically you could use a hybrid approach as Myaro mentioned. If Complications are heavier on memory and battery (which was my original concern), you could get the value of the metric from the more classic Modules (ActivityMonitor, SensorHistory, Weather, etc) and then just generate the Complication Id on the fly in your Delegate and launch the widget. So you’re only using the Complications Module to launch the widget, but not really for the value or anything else.

for me, that’s fine for maybe like 90% of the complications that are available… but Stress still gets refreshed way more frequently in the complication than it does in SensorHistory. Also, I don’t believe you can get the “Next Calendar Event Time” any other way except through that complication. There might be apps out there that sync with Google or Apple cal, but that’s outside of my programming experience, and a packaged Complication for calendar event is so much cleaner to use lol. 

Does anyone have data that shows Complications are heavier on battery? I really like using them for their simplicity. 

The watch face I use day-to-day can access 5 complications, with one of them optionally from a CIQ publisher, and I have zero complaints about the battery life.  And when the data is published, it doesn't really matter much f you are subscribing or not.

Also, remember with SensorHistory, that's a history that at most updates every 1-2 minutes. So for things like heart rate is no where close to real time

Appreciate the insight on the battery performance, Jim. I love using the Complications module tbh, so I'm hoping there's minimal performance/battery discrepancies between the "classic" modules and the newer complications module. 

I basically started my little project just to "tweak" a native watch face that I liked on my FR965... only problem I had with the native face was that it had a big bubble displaying the seconds of the clock, and I wanted to swap it out to something meaningful. So in the screenshot below where I show my step count in the bottom center, the native watch face just had a big bubble showing the seconds of the clock. Felt like a waste of real estate. The native watch face also doesn't have the notification icon and the battery status unless you want to take up one of the 6 main metric spots, which also felt like a waste of real estate.

After a few iterations of my project, the top 3 and bottom 3 metrics can be swapped out for new complications via an on-device Menu2, and basically everything on the screen can launch the native widgets, including the notification icon and the battery status. I'm pretty happy with it now... it looks extremely close to a native fr965 watch face, and it functions like one too with the customizations and widget launches. 

Looks very nice! What are the names of the fonts you used for the numbers?