Thanks for sharing, indeed it is good to reuse and improve hardware whenever possible rather than just going to waste. Had never heard of this project before, so it was a good find.
I see the supported watches, still have a doubt: what is scenario looking like for the cheap smarwatches from Aliexpress and similar? Any chance to also flash a new firmware or is this limited to more CPU-powerful watches?
Wow, this looks pretty cool! It seems you have quite a few features going... The main reason I haven't gotten a smartwatch yet is because of privacy concerns. But now seems like a good time to experiment with one of the watches you support.
I also still dream of one day daily driving a Linux smartphone, but that feels a bit more unrealistic to me, as I have more expectations from a phone, like being able to use bank apps and having a good battery life. But for a smartwatch, which I only expect to show me some biometrics and pass notifications from my phone, this seems perfect.
On this note: aren't JavaScript and QML/Qt too heavy/bloated for a device so small? I expect them to constrain performance and battery life quite a bit, but I admit I don't have a clue and would love to be proven wrong...
Wild to see such fragmentation in such a niche space. It's an aftermarket Linux flash for smartwatches, and there are companion apps for SailfishOS and Ubuntu Touch, which are extremely niche flavors of the already very niche mobile Linux.
Not being much of a watch person let alone a smartwatch aficionado, I had no idea there were even that many smart watches. The long list looks impressive. I wonder if there are a lot of the same guts so it's not as bad of a nightmare to maintain as it looks. Either way, the list of supported devices is impressive.
Indeed quite some watches share the same platform as can be seen in this list:
https://wiki.asteroidos.org/index.php/Technical_Details_of_A...
But the manufacturers all cook their own soups and its surprising how much adaption is still necessary per device.
Think of the space as less "I want Linux on my wrist", and more "I want a [cheap || not 1st world expensive] smartwatch as a gift."
These folks do gods work of making them supported and a real shared platform (c.f. their self-post "The only real signal we get is occasional [chat visitor] going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again"")
I am running HarmonyOS on my watch (moved from Apple Watch to Huawei GT-6 41mm) now. Turns out it doesn't matter as third party apps on watches generally suck anyway (low functionality, mostly just companions to iOS/Android app, bad/not many options for UI).
This looks cool!! I have an Apple Watch that I’ve been perfectly satisfied with, but it strikes me that AsteroidOS might allow me to explore other unique smart devices relatively cheaply, by buying used/non-supported stuff and trying it out. Are there any in particular that you’d recommend to a newbie? Hopefully something that is both eBay-able[1] and fun?
These are all Linux kernel-based WearOS watches (not just smartbands running a barebones microcontroller), so could they be running a mainlined kernel and Linux OS such as pmOS? Of course the UI layer might be specific to the form factor, but everything else could just be standard.
In theory yes. Asteroidos has experimental support for a mainline watch.
Most vendors don't upstream their drivers and kernel mods. Also Android drivers use an abstraction layer and a different format to some extentent. So you have to reverse and write your own driver.
So they could run mainline if the vendor or a user bothers to upstream drivers and hardware quirks.
A lot of the vendors don't meet quality expectations of the kernel team and sources are usually for older kernel versions and the code would need changes or refactoring.
The mainlining work is usually done by the community, not necessarily vendors. The relevant pmOS wiki page is https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Watch but it may be less comprehensive or up-to-date than the AsteroidOS hardware support list. Everyone can help by adding technical info about hardware to the wiki!
Hey, thanks for the new release. I should definitely fix my wristband and start wearing my AsteroisOS watch again (LG Lenok).
You have probably addressed that somewhere, but would it be possible to run your UI stack somewhere else? (PostmarketOS).
My other wish for AsteroidOS would be for it to leverage Wi-Fi better. Not sure how much more energy it would use, but having a longer range for my notifications would be nice (at least on LAN). Being able to perform a few other actions independently of my phone would be great: weather % time updates, e-mail notifications, home assistant control, etc. I get that it may affect battery life as well.
While I'm at it: tiny bug report, but I adjusted the time while the stopwatch was running, and this affected the stopwatch result.
We have implemented a wifi toggle in the quickpanel with 2.0. But the wifi credentials still need to be entered into connmanctl on the cli. As soon as you got wifi set up and connected, you can already now sync weather data usin asteroid-weatherfetch. But right, wifi usually uses up to 30% more power and should be enabled selectively.
For the postmarket question, yes, it is our longterm goal to mainline watches, which we are sort of doing in coorperation with the postmarket guys. But thats a humongous task and part of the idea of this 2.0 release is to interest capable contributors to push things further ;)
This is an awesome project. Props to y'all for just making something you want to exist!
I have a Tizen-based Samsung watch (Gear Sport, 2017). It's served me faithfully but I'm starting to notice the battery degrading. I'd be interested in trying AsteroidOS with it, if Tizen support ever lands.
Thats awesome! Recently I was looking into making apps for my smartwatch that don't exist (like watch display with multiple timezones), and infrastructure to make your own apps is very poor.
One thing I wish for is Rust support, since its running Linux it should be possible, isn't it?
It would be possible to use Rust. Nobody got around working on it tbh. But simple things like your mentioned watchface idea are really quick to do in QML.
Can anyone suggest where to find a watch that is supported if you live in the US? I've been scanning eBay but it feels difficult to get ahold of a supported device. Are there sites that ship to the US where a new or used device can be found?
Usually the Ticwatch Pro 2018/2020 (catfish) is widely available since it was a popular model. The more recent version Ticwatch Pro 3 (rubyfish/rover) is freshly ported and not as well supported as the first Ticwatch Pro yet. I bought one new in box just this week from german ebay for 70€.
We got a Team member in the US/ML who is hoarding watches and seems to have no problem acquiring them :D I wish you luck.
I would love if it would support some of the no-brand Chinese watches you get usually for cheap, the hardware is great but the software usually is bad or outdated. I use one now, I don’t even know anything about it other than the Bluetooth name and app name, but it’s good in measuring distance, blood pressure, heart rate, sleep, among others that’s surprisingly it’s very accurate, it also has a builtin strong flashlight, I like it but with a fully fledged linux would definitely be better.
Perfect! Our Ring is libhybris, Sauron is the binary blob drivers the manufacturers cursed us with, and we're still hobbling toward mainline Mordor one old kernel backport at a time. One does not simply upstream a smartwatch driver.
I have a galaxy watch 4 which I'd hoped was old-enough to be supported but I can see that it is not. I get it, hardware is hard.
I'm curious, is the challenge with newer hardware lack of chipset drivers for modern watches, or is there a fundamental difference between the new devices and the old ones that make them completely incompatible with asteroidOS?
With the latest devices its usually a problem that manufacturers choose to omit the usb pin outs in favor of water resistance and wireless charging. Making them a challenge to flash and still wear afterwards.
Another issue is that we currently need to rely on libhybris for quick porting process that employs the android drivers. And the new devices run android versions that libhybris can not handle yet. Its just a slow process on all fronts but we are actually releasing this 2.0 publicly to possibly interest more developers.
The main UI and GUI components are Qt. So you could use Qt bindings to build something with Rust.
If you don't want the same look and feel, it's just a normal linux with wayland and systemd. Cross compile to the architecture and adapt the UI to the small displays and you should be fine.
The one thing Qt is the most attacked for is the licensing. I disagree with this sentiment, it is pretty straightforward to me.
There are other fair criticism of Qt, more specifically about Qt Quick/QML: the need for 2-3 languages (C++/QML/JavaScript), using C++, not using modern C++, not enough out-of-the-box widgets compared to Qt Widgets, and the clusterfuck that is layouts in QML.
Out of all, the only real one for me is layouts. They are painful to deal with. I never had a problem with Qt Widgets layouts though.
Fair suspicion in 2026 — but we actually started drafting that announcement in early 2023 before first committing it here: https://github.com/jrtberlin/aos2.0-post. As a non native speaker i sure ran my commits through grammar polishing multiple times over the years. And i am genuinely curious now what to avoid to not sound like an LLM if you could dig out one or two examples.
FWIW as someone who sadly has about 10% of his brain constantly engaged in AI detection when I read HN, absolutely nothing about the announcement struck me as feeling AI generated.
(I feel guilty for pointing it out but I guess it's actually a compliment in this context: I even saw a beautifully reassuring mis-conjugated verb elsewhere on the website. I wonder if LLMs will have to start injecting these errors to give us an authentic feel. Maybe they already have).
I think we are at a point now where just coz AI is so prevalent, every post on any programming forum will have at least one comment saying "AI slop".