I’m a privacy focused individual, I run GrapheneOS on my phone & self-host as much of my tech stacks to avoid sharing info with. I’m looking for recommendations of smartwatches that align with the ideals of this community. What watch do you use? What do you recommend?
Look out for devices supported by Gadgetbridge, completely frees you from any intrusive manufacturer clouds!
Seems like Garmin fits the bill, I am still figuring out if that’s my future solution for NFC payments.
Garmin is what I was looking at, but it seems to only have experimental support in GadgetBridge
You can also just use your Garmin watch on its own without any app. You can plug your Garmin watch into your PC and export your data into a self hosted fitness tracker like endurain for example.
Does a Garmin watch by itself share any data with Garmin servers?
I’m not sure about all Garmin watches, but most of them don’t have wifi. So in those cases their only way of getting data to Garmin servers is via syncing with the app.
I’ve got Monzo working with my Garmin. I use Graphene, so it’s literally my only option for payments considering Curve failed my ID check and refuse to reply to my emails trying to sort it out.
I have both a PineTime and BangleJS . . . but I am eagerly awaiting the release of the new Pebble watches. The round looks great . . . but does not include pulse. Whereas the square one look a bit more tech . . and does include a pulse monitor.
One of the big things for a smartwatch for me is seeing the live-feed bus schedule, and the old pebble watches had support for OneBusAway, which would really come in handy for not just not having to pull out my phone in a crowded stop, but when running for the bus.
I’m using a Pinetime
It’s not the best smartwatch, but for the price it’s awesome. Fully open source and open hardware, it does what it has to do and does not shares a single thing with some shitty 3rd party It connects with gadgetbridgeHow useful is the heart rate tracker on the PineTime? I’ve seen comments saying it hurts the battery life and isn’t accurate, but I don’t know if that’s been addressed with more recent updates.
I have PineTime setup with the heart rate tracker and always-on screen, the battery lasts all day if I charge it every night. In the latest update you can set the heart rate tracker to only poll every 1/5/10/30min if you’re concerned about the power. The always-on screen uses much more power than the heart rate tracker.
Seriously though, one of the major smartwatch manufacturers made a smartwatch in retro style like this but it didn’t sell.Yeah! I want a calculator watch style.
I don’t know how well it measures up to privacy standards at the level of GrapheneOS, but Ollee might be of interest to you if you want to go the retro route. It lets you convert a standard Casio F-91W into a smartwatch.
Any thing that works with gadgetbridge. My huwai watch worked perfect and had a week battery life.
If you want a watch the lines up with FOSS ideals you’d want something like banglejs, pinetime or pebble. If you want the best experience while still being private, I would recomended Amazfit paired with gadgetbridge. Their watches are cheap, look nice and they get great battery life. Works perfectly with gadgetbridge.
Last time I checked the best corpo watches for gadgetbridge were the CMF 2 or 3
Or Mi bands (with GB). Xiaomi hardware is great ignoring their newer phones, but their privacy is horrendous(but as far as I know, they don’t profit from their hardware sales at all, so you don’t support the company).
If you want the official app, Garmin is relatively private, but it forces you to cloud sync if you use the app (the app works without GMS, but doesn’t display the map.)
I’ve not used one of these, but they look promising:
I use it on an older Ticwatch C2+ with gadget bridge.
I like it. It works well for what I need it for. They just released 2.0, which means it’s still actively developed (though development is slow)
My only issue is that with newer versions of android, something about the bluetooth makes it disconnect randomly. Don’t know if that’s just my device, or my phone, or common. But I randomly have to forget the device and re-pair it. Which is kind of annoying.
Well, there is no GPS/HR tracking, so it isn’t very useful apart from telling the time.
