Feature request: HTTP requests from SuuntoPlus sports apps (via the paired phone)

[Michal Bryxí]

Hi all,

I own a Suunto Vertical 2 and I’m looking into building a SuuntoPlus sports app for paragliding, hang-gliding and other wind-dependent sports.

What I’m trying to build

I’m involved with winds.mobi, a free, open-source live wind map used by free-flight pilots. It collects readings from thousands of weather stations across many providers and serves them through a simple public JSON API.

The app idea is simple:

• Take the watch’s current GPS position.
• Show the 5 closest weather stations with their current average wind, gusts and direction.
• Optionally open one station to see its wind history for the last hour or two.

Why

Before launch, and often during a flight or a kite session, conditions change fast. Pulling out the phone with gloves on, in the harness, or on the water isn’t practical. A glance at the wrist showing “the station 2 km away is gusting 35 km/h from the west” is a real safety feature, not just a nice-to-have.

What’s missing

As far as I can tell from the SuuntoPlus Editor reference, a sports app can’t get any data from the internet. There’s no HTTP or fetch API, and no way to ask the Suunto app on the phone to make a request on the app’s behalf. The only inputs are the watch’s own sensors, BLE devices, and settings the user types in by hand. So any app that depends on live online data (weather stations, tides, snow and avalanche reports, lift status, race tracking, and so on) can’t be built today without a separate companion app.

What would need to happen

Something along the lines of Garmin Connect IQ’s makeWebRequest:

• The sports app calls something like $.http(url, callback).
• The watch passes the request to the paired Suunto app over Bluetooth. The phone makes the HTTPS request and returns the (small) response to the watch.
• The app declares the domains it is allowed to call in manifest.json. The user sees this when installing it from the SuuntoPlus Store, so it’s transparent and can be reviewed.
• Sensible limits are fine: small response size (a few KB is plenty), rate limits, HTTPS only, and only while the phone is connected. For my use case, a request every few minutes returning around 1 KB of JSON would be enough.

Related

Others have asked for the same thing in this thread, mentioning notifications, currency rates and weather. There was no reply from Suunto there, so I’d love to hear whether this is on the roadmap, or whether there’s another supported way to get live data into a sports app that I’ve missed.

Opening SuuntoPlus to all developers was a great move. Internet access through the phone would unlock a whole category of apps that Suunto watches can’t offer today. We’d really like this to become an option, and I’m happy to help test it.

Thanks!