I couldn’t find any when I looked around a couple of years ago. Anything these days? And if none are floating on the market, are there any decent wrist watches that respect your privacy and don’t send all the dam data home?
I couldn’t find any when I looked around a couple of years ago. Anything these days? And if none are floating on the market, are there any decent wrist watches that respect your privacy and don’t send all the dam data home?
https://gadgetbridge.org/
This is where I’d start
I’ve heard Garmin is decent, and Pebble is coming back
https://repebble.com/
Personally, I’m pretty excited about the Pebble coming back. Cautiously optimistic, but optimistic nonetheless.
Garmin sends all your health data to the cloud and the app won’t work without an Internet connection.
On the plus side, they’re not part of the Google/Apple/Samsung data ecosystems, and I don’t think actually they do anything with the data, beyond computing statistics for you.
Depends how much you’re prepared to trust them I guess.
Gadgetbridge supports a good chunk of their watches. Completely offline and you can configure watch settings through it.
Does it support heart rate tracking?
Mine does (a fenix 7). I think any model that has a heart rate sensor would probably work based on the wiki page. There are certain models that offload sleep tracking to the official app, and I don’t think those support sleep tracking in gadgetbridge yet (last I checked this was the case), but the ones that handle it on the watch like mine fully support that too (and you can view stats and a graph in gadgetbridge).
Speaking of the wiki page: https://gadgetbridge.org/basics/topics/garmin/ - there’s a lot to parse since so many models apply, but my fenix 7 has had full support aside from live cloud maps in the weather app, and I’ve been issue-free since last October aside from a couple things they quickly fixed for me after I opened them.
There are 2 main gotchyas:
despite the weather sync not requiring the official app (gadgetbridge can sync with breezy weather), the watch stops trying to refresh it if it’s been ~3 months since rotating the api key. In the advanced settings you can have gadgetbridge create a new api key for you, but that may break the ability to use the official app (I don’t so I went with that).
gadgetbridge can’t update the firmware or maps, however you can update directly on the watch via wifi, or you can use the PC app (which works great in a libvirt windows vm).
How do you like the sleep tracking? Is it fairly accurate? I tried a cheap Colmi ring and the sleep data was all over the place, registering sleep when I had insomnia and occasionally awake when I was asleep
That is cool so data from the watch is retrieved and seen through gadget bridge if I’m getting it right for the features it is able to access?
I’ve never had a smart watch, but I guess with the way it would work with gadget bridge for supported watches is that you can keep it not connected to the wifi and just rely solely on Bluetooth to communicate with gadget bridge?
Exactly. Gadgetbridge reverse engineered the protocol so it can configure all the same settings the Garmin app can, notifications get forwarded to the watch, the watch sends its sensor data, gps tracks, etc and Gadgetbridge knows what to do with the data so it’s displayed in graphs and lists, etc.
And yeah, if you get a watch without wifi or don’t connect one with it to a network, then all data i/o is going to be exclusively bluetooth with Gadgetbridge, which specifically avoids the network permission (so there’s zero chance of anything leaking to a server somewhere.) That’s why it communicates with a weather app fur that data instead if pulling it in itself.
It also works with more than just smart watches; like I can use it to configure the buttons, noise cancelling state, etc on my bluetooth headphones.
However, unless something has changed with newer models, you do not need to use the application or connect to Garmin’s servers to use the watch.
however if you want to change goals (eg steps per day) you have to use the app
I consider that quite a minor feature (that I don’t use) as a Forerunner owner who bought mine specifcally for running and other activity tracking, but Garmin does have a wide range of models so I’m sure there are people who would require the app for other things like you say.
Their privacy policy is good