Weather in watchface?

Unfortunately this isn't possible.

Garmin has a remarkable battery life thanks to restrictions for watch faces to things like communications to the outside world, sensors etc.

I bet the $100 Pebble can't match Garmin's battery life.

My $100 Pebble had that option.

So use your Pebble for that. It's a misguided and invalid assumption that if product‑X does something (that you like), then product‑Y “should” – as a matter of either logical induction or commercial obligation – offer all the same desirable features, irrespective of whether the latter came to the market much later, and/or has a significantly higher asking price.

As I've replied in your other thread, if you want what you described, it's doable – but first you need to make a conscious decision to accept that you're trading battery life and access to widgets, and make the compromise without begrudging it.

Don't just jump to solution mode on the basis of limited information and invalid assumptions; the functionality cannot be delivered by a Connect‑IQ watch face.

Hey folks — ex-pebbler here too.

So, I tend to agree that providing network activity to watchfaces isn't the solution here. The native Garmin weather widget obviously provides this feature.

That being said, if you've ever sniffed the network traffic from GCM on your phone, GCM is polling for the weather (using Garmins own weather service that they acquired a few years back) — even when you don't have the weather widget displayed.

So, it's likely that the Weather is stored periodically in GCM.

If CIQ provided an API to access this weather (in the same way you access sensor data) then this could be displayed on watchface without any external network request. The weather doesn't change every minute, so this data could be cached, and refreshed whenever the watch syncs with the phone.

You would effectively get the Weather "for free" without any additional power drain, addressing both power draw and usability concerns.

Food for thought.

the functionality cannot be delivered by a Connect‑IQ watch face.

Actually, this is not true. Several watch faces have such functionality with different sources.
Examples:
https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/767ccbff-bcf4-416d-9788-9cb00a7087dc
https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/85c117c0-1d14-4cbb-885a-f19388970645
https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/8dbdab69-191a-4621-9d8e-8f8c5f14aeb5

So, the question is interesting, but not answered yet.

Yes - quite a lot has changed since that last post!

Background services now allow you to retrieve data from external sources, like a weather service and include them in a watchface.

As Franco said, with CIQ 2.3.x and backgrounding (2.3.x was announced in Mid April), you can display this on most CIQ 2.x devices - the exception right now is the Approach S60. Simple Darksky is one of mine, BTW.

I did a guest blog post about backgrounding in fact, and there's a thread that I reference with a very simple example of backgrounding. There's a link in the blog post.

https://developer.garmin.com/index.p...ground-service