After two months of hard work we are pleased to announce the availability of Gadgetbridge 0.12.2.

For those who don't know, Gadgetbridge is an Open Source Android app for interacting with smart watches (currently Pebble), fitness trackers (currently Mi Band) which does not send your data to any third parties.

Visible Changes

The list of visible changes in the new version is a quick read:

  • Support for Pebble Health on Firmware 4.0
  • Fixed displaying of deep sleep vs. light sleep for Mi Bands
  • Moved some data import/export operations to a dedicated screen
  • Devices are now displayed even if Bluetooth is turned off

So why did it take us that long to release that?

Answer: because of many invisible changes under the hood.

The most important change is the much richer database schema and much nicer access to its data, with the help of greenDAO.

But it already worked fine before, what are the benefits?

I'm glad you asked, here they are:

  • Your activity data (steps, sleep tracking, etc.) is now stored per device, per user and includes additional data. It's all nicely separated, so you will be able to tell exactly with which device, even with which firmware version you ran that marathon back then in 2018. Oh and all your configured user data, e.g. your weight will be associated as well.

  • Per user?? Yes. Gadgetbridge associates your activity data and everything else to a user in your database. At the moment there is just one, but there could be more in a family where not everybody has a smart phone, maybe even some you didn't think of at all.

  • Now that everything's cleanly separated, we will (in the coming versions) provide ways to better visualize your data.

  • You will also be able to categorize your activity manually. So far, Gadgetbridge mostly differentiates betweens light sleep, deep sleep and no sleep. But it is already prepared to accept your own activity classification, by tags and descriptions. You will be able to retrospectively tell why your heart rate jumped to 180 bpm in October 2016 when you tag it with "climbed the Monte Baldo by bike".
    The tagging might also enable creative people to implement activity recognition algorithms based on the specific patterns captured by the activity trackers.

  • Speaking of heart rate -- we will add more measurement options and especially record the measurements in the database, soon.

  • Oh, and now that we have a rather stable database interface, we hope to have a self hostable synchronization server at some point. Please contact us if you want to work on this!

  • And finally, we will be able to easily integrate data from new devices (e.g. Pebble 2 and Mi Band 2).

Roundup

So to sum up, this release is mostly unspectacular for users, except for the few points at the top of this post.

But it is spectacular for our ability to improve the application and add new features.

Please join us if like Gadgetbridge, help us improve it, add support for new devices, translate it or help with documentation.

We're also looking for a discussion forum, preferably one that supports Github authentication. Discourse would be an option, but so far we have not managed to get a forum on their servers.

Any help is much appreciated.