I’m a privacy focused individual, I run GrapheneOS on my phone & self-host as much of my tech stacks to avoid sharing info with. I’m looking for recommendations of smartwatches that align with the ideals of this community. What watch do you use? What do you recommend?
Linux on desktop, self-hosting and GrapheneOS too.
I have a few smart watches, namely PineTime and Watchy by SQFMI but… honestly I don’t wear them anymore simply because I try to be as minimalist as possible. In fact just yesterday afternoon I was wondering if I could do without GrapheneOS because I might actually NOT need a phone.
So… what do you want out of watch?
I can recommend both but honestly it depends on your need.
What the goal of the watch is does seem important, Thinking about it a little bit I think these are what I’m interested in:
- Telling the time
- Media control
- Notifications
- Sleep / exercise tracking
Any thing that works with gadgetbridge. My huwai watch worked perfect and had a week battery life.
I’ve not used one of these, but they look promising:
I use it on an older Ticwatch C2+ with gadget bridge.
I like it. It works well for what I need it for. They just released 2.0, which means it’s still actively developed (though development is slow)
My only issue is that with newer versions of android, something about the bluetooth makes it disconnect randomly. Don’t know if that’s just my device, or my phone, or common. But I randomly have to forget the device and re-pair it. Which is kind of annoying.
I don’t have any recommendations buy will say that my watch is one thing that I’ve changed over the last 2 years to be “just” a watch. I used to have a Huawei and Samsung and use it for tracking everything but I decided to get a Citizen Eco-Drive and haven’t looked back since. Can’t get more private than that :D



