Smartbands have had that impact sought in smartwatches. And more or less is what it is about Gadgetbridge, an app that can replace to those of Pebble, Mi Band, Amazfit and others in order to manage all the information received from those smart bracelets.
Those apps take care of connect the ecosystem of services created and managed by the manufacturer, and that are nourished by all the information provided by the wearables dedicated to the control of our physical state. Gadgetbridge is a new app for Android that will allow you to disassociate yourself from the manufacturer of your smartband forever.
An alternative app to the older smartbands
The problem with those apps that manage all the data we provide is that many are manufacturer exclusive. Samsung Health, itself, was recently updated to cut the wings of other smartbands with which data can no longer be supplied to the Korean brand's app. It's an example of how those companies want you to stay in their ecosystem.
Hence the importance of a free open source app as is Gadgetbridge. For most smartbands, an account must be created with the manufacturer and thus continue to track our activity and receive all the data. This means that not all users are happy with the use that can finally be made of all this health-related data.
Data as important as knowing our heart rate before and after going for a run, or even the kilometers and time spent in a race. Data that they may seem not important at all, but if we multiply them with hundreds of thousands, they can be used to resell them to third parties to carry out all kinds of studies and more.
Be open source for peace of mind
That Gadgetbridge is open source means that we remove the manufacturer from the equation and that any developer can really know how to operate this application. We can also remove all those shadows on privacy that could fall on this new app that you have for free from the Google Play Store.
Gadgetbridge allows us to use several smartbands such as those of Pebble, Xiaomi Mi Band, Amazfit Bip, HPlus ZeBand, Xqwatch and many others, to become independent from the app of those brands.
Best of all, Gadgetbridge comes with a large number of features Among which we can include call notifications, reject an incoming one, phone notifications, predefined responses, calendar synchronization, smart alarms, weather information, activity tracking, sleep, heart rate monitoring, control of the music reproduction, watch faces for personalization and many others that we leave you in the mystery so that you can discover them for yourself.
For those of you who use ROMs, you will have the opportunity to configure the weather information of Mi Band with LineageOS and even activate the text message notification on the Mi Band 2.
How to install Gadgetbridge
Gadgetbridge is not in the Google Play Store, though yes it can be downloaded easily from F-Droid. We can also access the source code at GitHub to take a look at the app itself.
Download: GadgetBride on F-Droid.
They also have their Official website from this link to keep up to date with the news, the updates that will be arriving and the full list of compatible devices with this alternative to the official apps of many brands that launch smartbands on the market. If you have any kind of problem, you can also go through this link to find out about the most well-known problems.
Una opportunity to spice up one of those wearables that we can have in the drawer such as those from Xiaomi; just the one that remains the second best-selling wearable brand on the market.
Do not delay e install GadgetBride to switch from official smartband apps. A real and free alternative that you have from F-Droid.