Howto implement weather in watchface

Watchapp Development
1

What is the goto way of implementing weather support in watchface? I don’t use watchfaces with weather so I don’t know what is the expected UX when setting up weather in watchface settings, what APIs are the best etc.

If someone could recommend me a watchface that is open source and holds up to the good standards that would be great. Ideally I would like to implement weather using Clay.

2

TimeStyle was updated in modern times and now uses OpenMeteo, which doesn’t require an API key (though if everyone in the community starts using it, maybe the uptick would require it?)

Either way, it could be a good starting point. It isn’t using Clay but I think the minimalism of what is allowed by a user could be good to start

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3

Thanks, I will try that.

4

UX-wise, what I expect from weather in a watch face is roughly:

  • Location picker (fixed location, or GPS location)
  • Unit picker
  • Maybe a refresh interval picker (or just use a sensible default and don’t have the user think about it!)
  • Caching data so that the weather complication isn’t blank when the watchface starts

Asking the user to paste their own API token for a service like OpenWeatherMap isn’t good, but it’s fairly common in the pebble space.

5

Great list. I did some of those in Jealous watchface but I see it can still be improved.

  1. I don’t have location picker as that would require another API call to find location by name. I use GPS location but it’s cached. So you have to enable it only once to get your current location and then it’s stored. If you move around only one city then this is good enough and this is how I use it.
  2. I have unit picker. I agree this is essential.
  3. I use 30 min interval + it gets fresh values every time watchface starts. I found this combination to make me not think about refresh rate.
  4. Hmm, this is something I could improve. I only cache GPS location.

For now https://open-meteo.com/ don’t require any tokens but I will not be surprised if this change in the future.

6

I move around a lot of cities a lot of often. How do I get a new GPS location update with this situation? Do I need to reinstall the face?

7

It always tries to get new GPS location. It will fallback to previously stored location only if it fails to get new position because GPS is disabled or it failed to get current position.

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