I’ve been using a Galaxy Watch Active 2 for the past years. The reason why I’ve chosen it is because I can activate it and use it fully offline and without even connecting to a phone.
Now that the watch is dead, I’m in the market for a new one. I’ve been looking at the Galaxy Watch 5 / 6 and the Ticwatch.
I want a smartwatch to measure sport activity and control music playback. Having thousands of watchfaces to choose and customize would also be great.
I don’t want the smartwatch to require login to any online account and send my data.
I have a Pixel 7 Pro running Graphene OS. Please help me in my choice.
Probably any watch with Gadgetbridge support from a privacy perspective (AsteroidOS watches as mentioned above are included in that, but idk anything about AsteroidOS myself).
From what I’ve read over the years Garmin is among the “least worst” when it comes to wearables/IoT stuff. They are a mainstream company not a privacy-focused company, but from what I’ve heard (1) they give you more control (2) they have a somewhat decent privacy policy (3) they don’t have a business model based around data harvesting (4) Many of the core features can be used offline/don’t require interaction with the cloud.
Open Source projects like “gadgetbridge” have been around for a long time with limited support for some devices, I don’t have first hand experience with this though.