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.

So this is where Gadgetbridge comes in, of course, but it is important to realize that it takes a substantial effort to keep things running correctly. To ensure stable Bluetooth connection. To provide reliable firmware update system. To collect and display daily activities in a user friendly way. To keep up with firmware updates of all those supported watches and make sure stuff does not break (too much). And also, to provide a safe bridge between the smart bracelet and the phone, so notifications are not observed by other applications. For these very reason, Gadgetbridge does not have any network access, in fact it does not have network permission, so the Android system does not allow it to have any network communication at all. And this is good - good for the safety, good for the clear mind. Nice, clean, safe bridge between your phone and your smart bracelet's app. Thanks to all currently active but also to all previously very active developers for all the hard work!

But we must have even higher goals. People would like to not only collect their own data, but they also want to use it, look at it, analyze it or share it - if they want. So we should not only collect all the steps, activities hear rates... we must also provide a way to export it to be able to use it on day to day bases, easily. To share for example GPS information recorded on some watches, Gadgetbridge does allow exporting GPX files of recorded sports activities as files or as intents that other applications can use. Gadgetbridge can also export full database of all collected stuff (steps, heart rate and so on), together with all user preferences. But we must ensure that there are also apps that can receive our data - we should build more connections between our apps. Recently, the good folks at Open Tracks improved their GPX input intent listener, providing yet another app that can directly receive recorded GPS track shared by Gadgetbridge. They also worked hard to navigate through the confusing landscape of Bluetooth Low Energy communication to be able to accept data from heart rate sensor, enabled on the bracelet via Gadgetbridge settings. Same heart rate data can now also be used with the FitoTrack. The InfiniTime developers improved music controls and firmware updates, making a nice connection to Gadgetbridge. And we all should keep looking around for improving things in our small islands of app created silos and connect them with nice bridges. I strongly advice you to be creative in your thinking, talk to the developers of your favorite apps and propose ways for apps to keep talking to each other. No [hu]man app should be an island.