This is the first in many releases without any new Huami/Xiaomi device
supported, but still deserved a version bump from 0.54.x to 0.55.0, as we
added multiple new device independent features!
People were wondering how their battery discharges over time, so we started
logging it since release 0.54. There was just no finished graph to show the
discharge over time. This is now ready for release and part of 0.55.0. Just
tap on the battery icon in the main activity (aka "control center") and have
a look!
First month of the new year 2021 has delivered tons of new devices. We are
happy to see new people stepping up and providing the initial support for these
watches:
Wasp-os - Daniel Thompson
Amazfit Neo - xaos
Amazfit GTS 2 Mini - Andreas Shimokawa
Huami Zepp E - Andrew Watkins
Amazfit GTR 2e - Jochen S
Amazfit GTS 2e - Andreas Shimokawa
Amazfit X - Stefan Bora
Many thanks to all contributors!
While new devices' support is flowing in, this doesn't mean that all features
and functions of these newly added devices are working, but the initial support
typically already provides many important aspects required for day to day
usage. It also offers a very convenient way to look at these devices in more
detail and help to improve their support further. These Gadgetbridge releases
(0.53.0, 0.54.0 and 0.54.1) also contain many small and big fixes and
improvements all over the place :).
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.
Christmas holidays was a good time to relax, recharge and take some time off.
After that, commits and pull requests started flowing in with various fixes and
improvements. One of the contributions has brought support for another variant
of Amazfit watches:
Amazfit Bip U Pro contributed by DanialHanif - thank you!
Also the Amazfit GTS2, which was previously supported in theory but was
practically unusable due to a pairing bug, should now work properly.
For some reason, data in Weather notification
sometimes provides incomplete data, which resulted in weather updates not being
sent at all to the smart device. This behavior is now handled properly in this
Gadgetbridge release.
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!
We do not know why Huami releases so many new devices every year. These have
become too much to buy all of them, but it is always nice to have pull
requests from the community, which happened for the Bip U and Verge Lite
during this cycle. Thank you!
But there is a lot more to this release!
Apart from the usual bug fixes and tweaks, we overhauled the daily stats widget
completely which is now much better looking and more functional.
Also device code contributors have pushed improvements, most notably the Casio
GBX-100 and Bangle.js which now support activity data recording.
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.
This release comes just two weeks after the previous version bump, but brings a
support for a new device:
Casio GBX-100 contributed by Andreas Böhler.
Another important new feature in this release is support for flashing watchfaces
for the Amazfit/Mi Band 5. These devices support up to three custom watch faces
plus two factory ones.
Even though it looks easy then you know how, it took a lot of time and effort to
analyze and implement this correctly.
On the user interface side, the Sports Activities got their Dashboard view
revamped to better match the design of the recently added Activity List
Dashboard. And, utilizing all the work done on our new sortable type of
preference widget, the Charts Tabs can now be selectively enabled/disabled and
also arranged as preferred by each user, independently for each device.
Initial support for few new Huami devices has been added:
Amazfit Bip S Lite
Amazfit GTR 2/GTS 2
Thanks to contributors who own these devices and were able test and integrate
the required changes into Gadgetbridge. Adding a new without us having access
to the physical device can be hard, so any effort is appreciated.
To make new developer's lives easier, the New Device
Tutorial
has been improved a lot, providing good guidance in adding a new device,
storing activity data and also providing preference interface and storage.
Gadgetbridge 0.48.0 has been tagged and will appear on F-Droid soon! As always,
this can take a few days.
Six code contributors and twenty one translators have contributed more then 130
commits to the latest release of Gadgetbridge, bringing support for three new
devices:
The Sony SWR12 bands
Lefun Smart Bands
Nut
The Nut devices use the Nordic firmware update protocol (DFU) by using the
official nordic library. This enabled us to also use it for other devices
like the like the PineTime (InfiniTime), and probably more devices in the
future. PineTime InfitiTime firmware's music control, being recently improved,
also got improved support in Gadgetbridge. All of the work mentioned in this
paragraph was contributed by Taavi Eomäe. Thanks Taavie!