Toybox.Timer works on Simulator , but freezes a real device.

flocsy🤠 said:

Users notice. It uses more battery

Yeah I think the 2 main things that users complain about when it comes to CIQ watchface is perceived additional battery drain and perceived sluggishness.

It's also why Garmin support always tells users to uninstall all CIQ apps and watchfaces lol.

BTW I "gave in" to this, as it kind of makes sense, so I switched the CIQ watch face I used for more than a year to one of the built in faces. I expected a drastical increase in battery life. I'll see in a few weeks, but so far it looks like it only increased from 5.5 to a out 7 days

With a AMOLED device and AOD, that will cause a big decrease in battery life.  I'd expect the same for native or CIQ watch faces.

fr965, AOD, and I expected bigger increase than 1.5 day.

With a 965, a CIQ WF, AOD off, I'm seeing the battery at 67% and 17 days remaining right now. At 100%, 25 days.  Turning on AOD at 100% with a CIQ watchface, drops it to 7 days, and same if I switch to a native WF

So at 67%, the number of days makes sense.  7-8 days uses 33% of the battery with AOD off.

Your numbers may vary, based on the specific WF you are using and how efferent it is. Not all watchfaces are written the same way.

The advertised 23 days means that you're wearing a brick with black screen, never look at it, never do an activity.

Actually what you're seeing is pretty similar to what I see. And it even contradicts what support says, because with ciq you can wear the black screen, while with the built in WF it's AOD and I haven't found a way to turn it off.

With AOD turned off for general use, and a native WF, it goes blank for me just like it does with a CIQ WF.

Are you saying with your CIQ WF it goes blank with AOD turned on?  It shouldn't and sounds like a bug in that WF.

No, the opposite:

The CIQ WF I use (not mine) is Big Easy. In the settings I have AOD to display the time only. So during the day I see the time, and when I touch the screen it displays the rest. During the night it's black, and when I touch it it displays everything.

With the built-in watch face during the day I see everything all the time (time, steps, floors, few other things), during the night it's black, and when I touch I see all of them.

Is there a way to make the built-in WF save a bit more battery by only displaying the time in AOD and only when I wake it up by touching then it displays the other things?

 I'm still trying to understand how data is managed. I see that a lot of people have a separate drawables.xml for each watchsize and employ a lot of tricks. 

0n Fitbit, I have a watch called Virtual Star with 100 png characters (each 10-20kb) and expressions, costumes, 7 backgrounds for every month that are probably 30kb each. Somehow that huge 50mb javascript program compresses down to a 1.4mb package on Fitbit (but for only 2 devices).  On Garmin, you the programmer have to be more smart.

I have a Garmin watch that is 3mb with no bitmaps, but it just has hundreds of settings and enums - the uncompressed program folder is very small  (50-100kb) , but as a "compressed" IQ package it becomes 3MB and 34kb memory usage.  Then I have a published watch with no settings or enums, and it has 50ish backgrounds at 20kb each and sprites and it goes from 18mb raw folder to a compressed IQ package of 2MB and only 14kb memory usage.

Overall , the freeze effect was easily removed by fixing the timer- but I admit battery and IQ package size are bigger issues in a lot of my programs.