Wouldn't it be nice if the Weather Widget update itself over wifi instead of using your phone?

I believe the biggest interest of this widget is to be updated when you're outside, so IMHO it makes much more sense to take advantage of the phone's 4G connectivity. I guess best would be to have both, but I personally keep wifi off to save battery life... so not that much interesting for me :)

The main way your watch updates the Weather (Widget) on your watch is the information your cell phone gets from the cell towers. I don’t think it would be possible and/or realistic to use a WiFi connection to update information like that. 

Yea I agree, as I’d love to have a Weather Widget independant from any external sources but unfortunately, I don’t think it’s feasible in these types of watches right now.

It would actually be useful for us at home/office who want to go out for a run.  Just to have the info there from wifi or 4G or BT would be a major improvement.

Considering how much wifi drains the battery compared to bluetooth LE, I think most users would prefer not to use wifi for transferring only small amounts of data. And the watch would have to update its location via GPS first, or people would start complaining that they get wrong weather info over wifi.

no, wi-fi is never 'ON', it just activates for a moment, when its needed. And another NO, as an athlete you need to know the weather while you are indoor and prepare for a run; it actually doesn't make sense to check the weather on a watch WHEN you have the phone with yourself where you can see more clearly the weather

I totally disagree.  Not everyone is tethered to their phone.  Some of us work outside or within the confines of our wifi.  Some people are on boats, or outdoors at a resort still in wifi range.

Even when wifi connection is negatiated only for a moment, it consumes much more energy than bluetooth LE (which also consumes hardly any energy when inactive and not transferring data). "Bluetooth uses less than 3 percent of the power required by Wi-Fi for the same tasks" (from https://itstillworks.com/bluetooth-vs-wifi-power-consumption-17630.html).

Also, for a small task the energy consumption of opening a wifi connection could use as much energy as the actual data transfer. The reason why Bluetooth LE is so good for the watch is that it's always virtually open (but consumes hardly any power when inactive). Then the watch can at any time very efficiently ask the phone's Garmin Connect Mobile to fetch the weather forecast, and let the phone do the power consuming work.

I do understand why using wifi for these kinds of things sounds like a good idea (especially if you don't want the watch to be connected to the phone). It's just that very few people use the watch that way, and my guess is that most people would be disappointed with the effect on battery life, and just complain anyway.

Wifi is used when you do a sync.  It doesn't use much battery at all since it connects and then shuts down wifi.  With a weather app all it needs to do is connect, get the info and disconnect/shut down wifi.  It does not need to be on all the time.  Seriously!   This is not exactly a complex thing to ask.  Here's what you do:

1. you check if BT is available if so you connect using it

2. If not, you start wifi, get the info! stop wifi, shut wifi down

3. Sit there displaying what you gathered.

Done!

I would definitely love to see this feature! It is nothing complicated and would allow me to lookup the weather without connecting to my phone before going out to do sports.

At home we all have wifi and it is much easier to connect to the wifi which is already on than go and search for the phone & turn bluetooth on just to get the current weather data. Furhtermore the GPS from the phones is usually a lot slower to get the location than the one from garmin devices. So it would have another advantage to get it directly through wifi since this would use GPS from watch instead of phone.