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Don't Get Your Apps Mixed Up

We recently noticed that the main F-Droid repository, where you normally search for apps to install, contains what appears to be a duplicate of Gadgetbridge.

The app in question (which we won't link to, to avoid adding to the confusion) is listed with the same name and icon as the real Gadgetbridge app, while its author, description and screenshots are different.

We have no reason to believe that this was done with malicious intent. However, we did not review the changes introduced by this app and we think this is a good opportunity to share a few words of caution.

Introducing the Gadgetbridge Contributors Policy

As Gadgetbridge continues to grow, so does the community of people contributing to it, and the range of tools they use. Recent advances in AI-assisted software development and reverse engineering have created new opportunities for contributors, but they have also raised important questions about code ownership, legality, licensing, quality, and long-term maintenance.

This post introduces our new contribution policy and the expectations we have for everyone who contributes to the project.

Managing a Public End to End Room on Matrix: Lessons Learned

As you can imagine, the team behind Gadgetbridge is motivated to use and spread the use of Free Software even in areas that are only tangential to the main scope of the project. Just to name a few examples, we are using Liberapay to collect donations (to all our donors: Thank you!), and the project's initiator even created the probably most widely known publicly available free software Git (and more!) hosting in Europe run by a collective.

It is in this spirit that we share our experience in managing and running a large public end-to-end encrypted (e2ee) room on matrix.org. Please be aware that this post is primarily intended for a technical audience and not for Gadgetbridge users.

gadgetbridge.org website relaunch

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!

Add GPS track to any recorded sports activity

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.

Adding battery info screen to Gadgetbridge

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.

Gadgetbridge 2020: year in review and numbers

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!

On building safe bridges

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.

2000 stars and counting

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)

Beware of unknown APKs online

Il testo in italiano si trova in calce. Italian text follows.

It has been brought to our attention that several websites provide APKs of Gadgetbridge instead of linking to the official release on F-Droid

This is happening a lot lately thanks to Gadgetbridge being able to flash custom firmwares to the Amazfit Bip device.

We strongly advise against installing APKs that are not verifiably built from our sources and instead do the following:

• Install f-droid and use it to install Gadgetbridge. This ensures that your device will get all new releases of Gadgetbridge
• alternatively install the APK downloaded from the f-droid website.
• If you are a developer and would like to build from source, you can clone our repository