Gadget Bridge

[Jon Davies]

Attention all Pebblers!  Fear not!

"oh no!" I hear you all cry.  Since Pebble has been bought out by FitBit, and will not be continuing the hardware, you might be thinking the life of your smartwatch has been suddenly shortened.

Why shortened life?

When you install the official Pebble app, you log into an online server.  That server provides you with your config, and enables you to install apps / watchfaces from the store.  If that server goes offline you probably won't be able to do any of the above any more :( I doubt FitBit will bother to keep the server(s) running for too long, since that is not in their interest.

What is Gadget Bridge?

"...

A free and cloudless replacement for your gadget vendors' closed source Android applications. Supports Pebble, Mi Band, Liveview, HPlus and more

..."

It looks promising: it seems they are striving to ensure support for (at least) popular apps / watchfaces.

Where is it?

Everything Gadget Bridge related can be found at:

https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge

Yay :)

Cheers,

Jon.

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Cheers,

Jon.

[Dan Nixon]

It seems pretty good from first look.

It has limited long term use though as you still reply on developer interest in the platform for watchfaces and applications (which you alo need to obtain packages for, there is no package manager here) and that will probably tail off well before FitBit kill Pebble services.

I'm trying it to see how well it handles notifications, after all if it can't do that right I couldn't care less about it.

Dan

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[Jon Davies]

Yes the notifications bit is quite contentious tbh.  They do seem to be doing ok with it from what I read.  Do you really think this project will die before FitBit kill Pebble servers?

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Cheers,

Jon.

[Dan Nixon]

It's not this project (i.e. Gadget Bridge) that I think will die, it is developer support for Pebble apps.

Pebble apps will have lost the majority of their audience so are not worth a developers time to maintain, even if a small minority still uses them through Gadget Bridge.

It may prove difficult to even use a lot of existing closed source Pebble apps as you will have to obtain the package somehow to load it via Gadget Bridge.

Also, notifications seem to be coming through as normal using Gadget Bridge, haven't tried mush else yet though.

Dan

[Jon Davies]

I get what you mean now.  Yeah, it'll be development for the love of it and nothing else :)

[Dan Nixon]

Had a better look at it now.

You are able to obtain packages for Pebble apps and watchfaces by using the developer version of the Pebble Store (for now).

Gadget Bridge does not work with anything that uses an internet connection (it is a privacy first project, so the app has no INTERNET permission).

If you really wanted to switch to it the easiest way is to factory reset the Pebble and start from scratch, this is because of the way the app managed applications and the arse backwards API the watch and Pebble cloud provide.

TL;DR: this is by no means a drop in replacement and until Pebble infrastructure stops working it is more effort than it is worth if you already use the Pebble app.

Dan

[Dan Nixon]

Calendar sync also doesn't work.

I didn't expect it to, but it did take me by surprise when my calendar events were missing on my pebble.

Dan