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Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

What I dream of is a health monitor watch that's built from open hardware and gives me complete control over and ownership of my data. I don't trust any profit-driven company, even Apple, with such private information.

EDIT: thanks to obenn, who pointed me towards [1]. Still in development, but looks promising.

[1] https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

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Since privacy is a key differentiator for them (huge financial incentives to actually deliver and not just pay lip service), and there are significant penalties waiting for them if they are lying about protecting privacy (as well as plenty of people who would love to call them out on it), Apple is probably the most trustworthy of any organization if you care about privacy. Also you can keep your data local with Apple hardware - it's encrypted and only available to your hardware - obviously a lot of the functionality they profiled today doesn't work if you take that stance, but it is an option.

Is it possible to download the data from the watch without an iDevice?

Probably not - I haven't heard about a jailbreak for Apple watches.

There have been rumors that Apple may release the Apple Watch for Android. I think it would be fascinating if they did so.

> huge financial incentives to actually deliver and not just pay lip service

Which? It's still all closed source and tivoized, so you're still taking their word for it. At most they'd have to bullshit together some whitepaper about what they claim to do.

> and there are significant penalties waiting for them if they are lying about protecting privacy

The same "significant" penalties that were applied to Equifax?

> Also you can keep your data local with Apple hardware - it's encrypted and only available to your hardware

Based on... their claims?

They already have several white papers about how they treat privacy - dunno why you would assume they are bullshit right off the bat.

As for validating their claims I don't need source code for that. There are enough people (like you, apparently) that have an axe to grind that would be more than happy to point out any malfeasance - for me that's far more valuable than having source code available.

Imagine believing this after seeing Apple's consistent lying about iMessage being "end-to-end encrypted": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Oh it‘s end-to-end encrypted. Whether the received and decrypted message on the iphone is saved end-to-end encrypted in a backup is another topic...

Privacy, by one of the biggest NSA data providers?

Apple's watch hardware advantage is a massive multi-billion dollar investment.

Eventually there will be inexpensive equivalents, but those will lag behind by 5+ years. The hobbyist/ Open/ Free market for smartphone and smaller devices is always going to lag way behind because there is no money to finance this kind of device.

Sadly, I think the era of free/ open(ish) hardware is coming to a close.

I trust Apple... enough, to use their Health app, but I don't like the watch. An Apple Watch, without the screen and apps, which can store data and just sync with your phone next time their in range of each other would be nice.

If you don't where a watch, and don't carry your phone with you everywhere, there doesn't seem to be any good fitness tracker, which also integrate with Apples Health app.

I want this too, but I guess the folks in Cupertino would rather upsell us a watch.

I'm trying out the Oura ring right now. It's really nice, especially for sleep tracking, but it doesn't fill up my rings in Apple Health the way my Watch does. It writes calories, for instance, to the "Active Energy" category, not the "Activity" one which corresponds to the ring.

Really annoying. Apple needs to figure out if it's a luxury watch company or a fitness watch company, or design specific products for both of those categories. Nobody works out with a Rolex on and eventually push will come to shove.

That would probably be a huge boon. I've enjoyed my watch for music and notifications, etc. But if that was available I'd probably opt for it in the future and wear a decent mechanical watch instead.

I'd like that option.

I don't see any possible way to fund the design and manufacturing of open hardware for a fitness tracker device that would meet consumer expectations for size, style, durability, and battery life. Apple, Garmin, Suunto, and Google (Fitbit) spend a fortune on product development and release new models every year. Any new market entrant would never be able to compete directly; they'd have to figure out some totally different physical form factor in order to have any chance.

Even if Apple is directly aligning their profits with the protection of your private data?

I agree with you.

But...

Wow, people really dislike this. Is it just HN culture to not want something like this?

I get it, I carry a phone and it tells the cloud all my secrets, blah blah. But fitness is health and I would just rather not send any of that to the cloud. Is that so hard to get?

Yeah, I don't get it either. I don't really want anything provided by the software on the watch, just the hardware, and I'll do the rest. I realise my use-case is in the 0.005%, but when companies can ship tens of millions of these I am surprised there isn't someone selling what I'm after.

The increased complexity of the devices and the cost of R&D and production make any small scale (even in the tens of millions) production of quality devices not economical.

This may also be caused by high litigation costs due to patents and licensing.

You don't have to send your health data to the cloud. Indeed, it's not enabled by default and directly getting health data off the phone onto a computer is actually pretty hard to do. I wish there were easier ways to get the health data off of the phone. Heck - can't even sync it to my iPad.

This is an Apple-related story, it draws a different crowd in my experience. I think more generally these consumer electronic stories tend to have pretty uninteresting discussions on this website, probably because there's very little barrier to entry. Not really surprising to see that it quickly devolves to reddit-tier upvote/downvote battles.

I think this is the case for most other fitness tracking purpose-built devices. I'm only not mentioning other brands because I'm not familiar with them, but from my personal experience with Garmin watches, all data is recorded according to the ANT FIT protocol and available as browsable files on the watch. You don't have to consent to uploading data to the cloud and broader analytics are opt-in rather than opt-out.

Some of Garmin's devices allow copying of data to software of your choice. This gives you a mature device that is excellent at managing your health but as long as you never connect it to the Garmin app, your data remains yours.

Have you tried building it yourself?

I looked into it but watches, like phones, fall into the category of things that really do just need built by a company with tiny unsolderable-by-humans parts. When I checked maybe a year ago I found a fitness tracker that someone had found a way to upload new firmware to, but the hardware was no longer manufactured so you had to find second-hand parts on eBay, and there weren't many on sale in Europe. I gave up hoping the idea of an open hardware health watch would be the topic of a Kickstarter in the future.

Have you looked at the Pine64 PineTime devkits?

I was pointed to that already - thanks. Looks promising.

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