Gadgetbridge 0.89.0: Two big new features¶

This release introduces two big new features: Health Connect and internet access! Wait... Sharing health data?!? Internet access?!? Isn't Gadgetbridge fully private and offline? Yes it is! Now, however, you can opt in to allowing your devices to access the internet in a way that is fully under your control. Read on for more details!

As usual, this release also contains support for many new devices, varying from smartwatches and bike computers to another solar energy storage system, and several smaller features and bug fixes.

Health Connect¶

In response to increasing questions from our community to be able to sync health data with external apps/systems, we actively worked together with a few contributors (mostly Merow and LLan) to make this integration a reality.

Health Connect is Android's own health data middleman that can connect providers and consumers of health data in a privacy preserving way. It has been open source and integrated into Android itself since Android 14. Still, we have been extra careful to make sure all required code is inactive when the integration is disabled.

One example of what can be done with this integration is something that has been requested a lot: sync steps with Home Assistant. With Gadgetbridge as data provider and the Home Assistant app as data consumer, no extra tools or scripts are needed to sync your steps with your Home Assistant instance.

More information can be found on the dedicated page on our website.

Internet access¶

This is another big new feature that seems somewhat out of place in Gadgetbridge. Ever since the first commit of the Gadgetbridge code in early 2015, the single biggest privacy measure has been the complete lack of internet connectivity by the means of not requesting the Internet access permission from Android. This is not changing with this release and it's not planned to ever happen.

For a few years, we've been hearing from some Gadgetbridge users who, while not trusting big tech providers or their device vendors with full access to their health data, lacked the convenience of accessing the internet.

Although it took us a long time, we strongly believe that our current internet access solution has been designed in such a way that it will keep everyone happy. The feature has been implemented in an optional separate add-on app. If you don't want or need internet, just don't install the add-on app and nothing changes. However, if you'd like to have access to an app store for installing watch apps, or want watch apps to be able to have internet access, that's possible now too. These new possibilities are now available for Pebble and Bangle.js devices.

With the basics in place to provide fully optional internet access to Gadgetbridge and devices, we have also made sure to make every internet connected feature opt-in by default. We even have a 'firewall' in place for devices like Garmins to be able to have a domain-level allowlist for the URLs they request. In the future, further features like syncing with self-hosted fitness trackers might be added using these building blocks.

More information can be found on the dedicated page on our website.

New devices¶

In this release we added support for almost 25 new devices. As usual several watches from Garmin are newly supported, and there many others like the CMF Watch Pro 3, several GloryFit watches and the Mi Band 4C. In the headphones category we now support the CMF Buds 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro.

And we have even more for Garmin fans: support for several Edge bike computers was also added, and the GPSMAP 66s handheld GPS computer.

Perhaps more interesting for some are the more special devices we now support, like the Sanitas SBM67 / SilverCrest SBM67 blood pressure meter and OneTouch blood glucose meters. But the biggest outlier in this release is the Zendure SolarFlow, a solar energy storage system.

Other improvements and fixes¶

Apart from the big features and new devices, we have also been busy with several smaller improvements and of course bug fixes. This section mentions some noteworthy changes.

For Amazfit/Huami, third-party real-time heart rate support was restored on several models, workout charts were improved for non-GPS activities, and Helio Strap detection can now be fine-tuned. Garmin devices benefit from better connection reliability, improved handling of activity and health metrics like VO₂ Max and sleep, and many fixes when processing activity files.

For CMF and GloryFit, activity parsing and settings were improved, several long-standing bugs were fixed, and GloryFit gained experimental SOS contact support. Pebble received weather fixes, app and watchface previews, and support for newer icons and additional watchfaces. Zepp OS adds new activity types such as e-bike and jump rope, along with fixes for weather, HRV, notifications, and barcode handling.

Other device improvements include fixes for Huawei Watch Fit syncing, added raw ECG data syncing, sunrise/sunset and resource upload support for InfiniTime, chart cleanup for Polar devices, and new settings for Marstek solar panels.

This release also includes many UI and charting improvements, such as new workout list filters, clearer and more accurate charts, better dashboard behavior, and faster, more reliable zip exports. Several long-standing UI glitches and stability issues were resolved. For developers and advanced users, our Debug screen has been completely revamped.

The entire list of changes and fixes can be found in the CHANGELOG file in our repository.

Get It Now¶

You can get the latest release from F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid and on our releases page.

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. Another alternative is to use Obtainium to download and update directly from Codeberg.

Our Internet Helper add-on app can be downloaded from the releases page (manually or with Obtainium) and soon also from F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid.

Thanks to our community and contributors for keeping Gadgetbridge growing!

The Gadgetbridge Team