We are very excited to announce our completely revamped website!
For a long time gadgetbridge.org was just generated from the README.md in
our main Gadgetbridge repository. That was all.
Real documentation was only found in our wiki, which was not exactly easy to
navigate or pretty. In addition it was tedious for outside contributors to
change the contents of the wiki because it was just not editable for
everyone.
This all changed now, thanks to Yusuf Cihan, please check it out!
One of the most missing and wanted features of Gadgetbridge for sports
enthusiasts with a Miband (or other Huami device) is to track a sports activity
which requests a connection to the original app, to provide GPS tracking. At
this point, Gadgetbridge does not have this possibility and as a work around,
the 3rd party Heart Rate sensor
sharing
has been the best option. This works quite well, but has a downside of some
activities/data being tracked only in Gadgetbridge while some other data are
only in other apps.
This is a short article to document a process of adding a fairly simple feature
to Gadgetbridge. This article is intended to newcomers wanting to participate
in Gadgetbridge development who do have some understanding of programming in
Java for Android (in Android Studio). Written by a fellow novice programmer in
the Android Java ecosystem, it hopes to serve as a basic introduction to some
of the concepts used in the Gadgetbridge codebase. There is more information in
our wiki, like the
Developer
documentation
and if you are looking for an advice how to add a new device support into
Gadgetbridge, there is a comprehensive New device
tutorial.
This has been a very busy but good year for Gadgetbridge, with 21 releases
since January 2020. It has been the first year after we have migrated to
Codeberg. One of the possible concern of the move has
been smaller visibility and loss of contributors, but opposite turned out to be
true. The visible favorite "star" data is of course lower - the previously
reached star numbers on the GitHub hosting went into several thousands (3600
stars), with 200 watchers and 627 forks and current data on Codeberg shows
smaller numbers after the first year: 173
stars, 22
watchers and 86
forks, but we did have
larger engagement and number of contributors. Big thank you to everybody being
involved with Gadgetbridge now or any time before!
Cool gadgets give us some really great possibilities, like tracking our
activities, controlling music and smart home devices, receiving notifications
and more. But in our strive for better, faster, lighter, smarter, cheaper... we
often forget the down side of our endeavors. Apps providing connections to our
devices do receive all our movement information, including precise location. We
have written about it previously, in 2017. But maybe
you do not care about the details of your whereabouts being shared and only
care about your communication. And your communication with friends and family
is surely safe with secure apps that have become widely popular, right? But
unfortunately, every notification that is forwarded to your smart bracelet even
though you received it from some very secure, end to end encrypted app like
Matrix or Signal, has been seen by the bracelet's companion app. These are
closed source applications provided mostly by the vendor of the gadget and it
is only up to the vendor to decide if they send these conversations to their
servers for further processing. It is now up to us to decide if we want to give
them fully detailed view into our lives.
Initiated in 2015 with the aim of providing pebble users freedom from the vendor servers (it's ironic that at the time of this writings the pebble servers will be shutdown in a few weeks, but I digress..), Gadgetbridge as of today:
issued 129 releases (on f-droid.org)
supports more than 10 wearable devices by several vendors
is translated to more than 25 languages (on weblate.org)
successfully appealed one DMCA take-down notice
received more than 3300 commits to master branch and counts more than 330 forks (on github.com)
included (merged) more than 150 pull requests (on github.com)
has more than 100 contributors (committers, including translators)
receives donations by over 30 patrons (on liberapay.com)
last but not least: it reached 2000 stars (on github.com)
Gadgetbridge does not upload your personal data anywhere.
Other apps often require you to create an account at one or more companies and provide personal data like your name, email address, age, size, weight, and more.
Smart gadgets then track your daily activity, e.g.