Ask HN: Programmable Watches with WiFi?

For me it is mainly a decoration of my drawer, but maybe comes close to what you are looking for. :)

The simplest integration is writing a daemon (in the language of your choice) that schedules wakes, syncs, and sends FreeDesktop notifications.

If you want more of a UI, then you'll be writing QtQuick, which is QML/Javascript/C++.

Their best supported watch is the TicWatch Pro: https://asteroidos.org/watches/catfish/

Main tradeoff: it’s very DIY (power management, UX polish, tooling). If you want less DIY, Wear OS gives a better SDK, but the platform lock-in is much stronger.

I'm currently wearing a TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra, which has wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. I've written personal tools for it, and its fairly painless (and free). As a developer with some background in Android, I enjoyed the experience. Getting apps approved for the app store is a pita though, as Google sets quite high bars for the review process.

I also have a Samsung Galaxy Watch4, which also has wifi. People here speak well of Pebble, which might be an option, but I have no real knowledge of it.

Finally, though, wifi is power-hungry and watches have limited batteries and endurance. Both Wear OS and WatchOS will limit wifi use by apps to conserve power, and you ultimately can't do much about that. Using Bluetooth to a phone, and its much greater wifi capacity, is a common approach.

Do note that it's very janky. By default web requests proxy via the phone - if you want to try wifi you have to switch into a "modal wifi mode" - do a batch of web requests and logic - then switch back into "normal" mode and then do something with the saved data.

You cannot push notifications from wifi but you could do:

1. request to open the app using a background service

2. toggle wifi mode

3. fetch the data and close the app

4. create watch notifications from the background service.

You may need to acknowledge the request to open the app with a button press - but I've also see examples of it just opening (not sure of conditions though).

If your Garmin is already paired with a wifi AP turn off your phone and give https://apps.garmin.com/apps/78a3fa7c-6f78-4d0e-94cd-b9bd874... a go to see the UX (needs Gemini API key).

Default OS is a community project. I followed development for a few years. It’s pretty solid last I checked with good battery life and support for user apps written in rust

You can write code using the Arduino IDE and there's a lot of Arduino/ESP32 libraries for MQTT, HTTP Clients, Websockets.

I just had to solve this problem recently. I've settled on Google Pixel Watch 4. There are some rabbit holes to go down though before it works reliably.