Gadgetbridge: A FOSS alternative to your fitness watch’s app

Putting a smart watch or band on your wrist means installing an app on your phone. That makes sense, given the tiny screens on these devices. The problem is that these apps tend to do more than you’d expect. Huawei’s, for example, has a store for watch faces and AI-powered coaching and who knows what else it does behind the scenes. Apple’s (Fitness), one of the more low-key ones, reserves a prominent spot for the Fitness+ button, a paid subscription for access to recorded classes. AI, by the way, has been spreading through the apps that pair with watches. (From here on, read “watches” as “watches and/or bands.”) The major companies in the industry have thrown their respective AIs into their health apps to make sense of the ton of data these watches collect and store on the phone. That they “hallucinate” seems to be treated as a mere detail — though it shouldn’t be. There’s a way out (that I know of, at least) that doesn’t go through these official apps. And only if you have an Android…