I did some research and according to Mozilla the Garmin watches are the best with privacy. I’m looking for a basic smart watch to use during my work day to show me notifications so I don’t have to pick up my phone since I work in serving food. Any suggetions especially that work with /e/ OS?
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You mean a smartwatch running /e/OS or an /e/OS smartphone that works with a smartwatch well?
I have OnePlus 7T (hotdogb) running /e/ OS. So I need that to work with a smart watch. Also, as I mentioned suggestions for the best basic privacy friendly smart watch is appreciated.
Take a look at the Gadgetbridge app. As far as I know, it’s the only way to use a smartwatch and keep all the data locally to yourself. All watches compatible with Gadgetbridge are therefore ideal for privacy-friendly use with eOS.
I can recommend the Amazfit watches myself, I use a GTR3 with eOS and am very happy with it!
Thank you for the recommendation and links. I see on their website there are limitations as not all features work well. What have you found to be lacking? Also, can you get the weather temperature from your phone to your watch?
I use a Coros Vertix 2 for a year now. Coros has (like the very most other manufacturers) a proprietary app and no clue at all about any privacy, so the app has lots of trackers.
What you can do is: block connections to unwanted servers. I use RethinkDNS for that.
A disadvantage is that you can do this only afterwards because the blocker app must first learn which servers are requested. This means the blocked app must first initiate these unwanted requests.
The advantage of using the original app (instead of Gadgetbridge) is that the app also does firmware updates, provides watch faces (and allows own personal design), allows configuration of watch parameters and individual sports modes.
Thank you for the suggestion. How are you able to get all those updatrs if connections to the servers is being blocked?
The background app RethinkDNS monitors all network traffic of all apps (and system components). When a concrete app has a traffic you don’t want you can block this concrete connection by rules (based on IP address or DNS name). This means on the other hand you can also allow the app still to have traffic which is needed. So I allow the COROS app to have traffic to the COROS servers.
I don’t do this address based fine tuning for many apps. Most of the apps I use are FOSS and do not cause unwanted traffic. But in the special case of the COROS app I do this very carefully. Generally apps from manufacturers of sports watches, blood sugar measurement or other medical devices, headphones, cars and also smart home facilities are predetermined to be handled with this special care.
But then personal information gathered from the watch goes to the COROS servers does it not?
That is why I recommended The PineTime. Open Hardware and Open Software. Meant to run with GadgetBridge (if on Android).
Almost everything works perfectly with Gadgetbridge and Amazfit.
To get the whole thing working, you need to install the manufacturer’s original app (“Zepp”) once and pair it with the watch. This is necessary to obtain the Amazfit auth key, which is retrieved using the huafetcher app.
Once this initial connection is established, you can also update the firmware or install your favorite watch faces.
Then you pair the smartwatch with Gadgetbridge using the auth key, after which you can delete the original app again - and from then on all the data recorded will remain with you.
What doesn’t work with the GTR3 is the weather synchronization and the updating of the AGPS, which doesn’t bother me, as you may just have to wait a little longer during training until the GPS in the watch gets a fix.
Thank you very much for sharing your experience with the Gadgetbridge-Amazfit-Combo. After reading your posts i got curious and ordered myself the rather cheap GTS2 mini and connected everything successfully. The only problem so far is that the watch does not show the notification for an incoming call. All the other notifications seem to work well.
Do you know that issue? Is there a fix?
Just to add that I use Garmin watch with Garmin Conect on /e/ OS for a couple of years without any problems.
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