Skip to content

Gadgetbridge 0.87.0: Many new devices, improvements and official builds

Highlights

  • New device support: Amazfit Active 2, Garmin (multiple models + diving), Xiaomi, Polar, Nothing Ear (a), Shokz, Soundcore, and more
  • New workout charts: cadence, elevation, HR, power, speed
  • Huawei: TruSleep sync support on newer devices
  • Garmin: New sync protocol, improved activity/workout handling
  • New pairing flow, automatic ZIP export, and easier GPX track naming
  • Official Gadgetbridge-signed builds, alongside F-Droid

New Device Support

Gadgetbridge 0.87.0 introduces initial support for a wide range of wearables, smart bands, headphones, sensors, printers and scales. Some highlights include:

  • Amazfit Active 2 Square, Helio Strap & Ring, Amazfit Balance 2 (experimental)
  • Garmin: Descent Mk3, Fenix 3/6X Pro, Forerunner 165 Music & 945, Instinct Tactical, Venu X1, Vívoactive 6, Vivomove Sport, Vivosmart 3, Edge 540, eTrex SE, inReach Mini 2, HRM 200 — plus initial diving support
  • Xiaomi / Redmi: Smart Band 9 Active, Band 10, Watch S4, Watch 5, Smart Band 3 (experimental)
  • Other wearables and sensors: Colmi R07/P76/P80/V76, Coospo H6/HW9/HW807, Polar H9, Haylou Watch 2 Pro, Shokz OpenSwim Pro, Soundcore AeroFit 2, Nothing Ear (a), Yawell rings R10 & R11, and more
  • Generic device support: heart rate sensors, thermal printers, and weight scales

Better Health & Fitness Monitoring

Several improvements make workout tracking and health monitoring more useful:

  • New workout charts: cadence, elevation, heart rate, power, speed
  • Huawei: TruSleep support on newer devices (HarmonyOS 5+), improved workout parsing, recovery heart rate, better activity syncing
  • Garmin: New sync protocol, activity fetch progress, split FIT files by type/year, alarms from phone on older watches
  • Charts: Sleep stage overlays (HR, SpO₂, temperature, respiratory rate), training load, improved averages

Internal Changes and Fixes

  • New pairing flow: Auth key activity during setup
  • GPX improvements: Rename track before uploading, save OpenTracks recordings
  • Automatic ZIP export for easier backups
  • UI improvements: Settings search, simplified permissions, faster workout list
  • Bluetooth: More reliable connections and reconnections for BLE, BTBR, and BT Classic
  • Fixes: Crashes (calendar, firmware, maps), disconnections, music player issues, translations, and more

Distribution Changes

For a long time, Gadgetbridge has been fully reproducible: anyone could rebuild our app from source and verify that the result matched the official F-Droid releases.

With this release, we have taken the next step and introduced our own signing keys, after finally defining a clear process that allows Gadgetbridge core developers to securely handle these keys in a robust way which also ensures the needed resilience.

What this means for you:

  • We now publish official builds signed by the Gadgetbridge team on Codeberg in addition to the F-Droid builds which continue to be signed with their keys.
  • You can install and update Gadgetbridge directly from our signed APKs, knowing they are verified and backed by our team.
  • Reproducibility remains: anyone can still build from source and check that the APKs match.
  • IzzyOnDroid has already added support for our official build and published it.
  • Additionally, other third-party stores may start offering Gadgetbridge using this mechanism, which ensures that their users are running a safe binary. If you were previously using a third-party build, we warmly invite you to switch to our own signed build for safety reasons, and we ask that you notify your store to update their sources.

In short, this gives users faster updates, more flexibility and trust — without compromising the openness and transparency Gadgetbridge is built on.

Important note for users currently using Gadgetbridge installed from F-Droid: Due to Android's signature system, you cannot directly update the F-Droid version with the Gadgetbridge-signed APKs. F-Droid will keep providing you with updates just as it always has done.

Work is already in progress to add our own builds to the main F-Droid repository beside the existing version, but please note that the availability of new versions in the main F-Droid repository will still follow their release process and that builds signed by us will be available when their own builds are complete and signed.

At the moment we advise F-Droid users to keep using the version distributed via F-Droid. We will share instructions for switching (which remains optional!) as soon as our official builds are distributed via F-Droid.

Android version compatibility

All good things come to an end, eventually. For us, the time has come to say goodbye to Android 5 (SDK/API level 21/22. This will be our last release supporting it. We try to stay compatible with Android versions that are up to 10 years old. Android 5 was first released in 2014, making it 11 years old by now. Several of our dependencies have dropped support for Android 5, which means we can't upgrade those anymore unless we do the same. All in all, we feel the time is right for increasing our minSdk to 23 after this release.

Get It Now

As always, you can get the latest release from F-Droid. Starting with this version you'll find binaries also on our releases page and on IzzyOnDroid. If you install Gadgetbridge directly from our releases page you will need to track updates manually! To be sure that you're running an updated version we recommend the use of an app repository like F-Droid or IzzyOnDroid.

Thanks to our community and contributors for keeping Gadgetbridge growing!

The Gadgetbridge Team