I thought Apple Watch was compatible with Android, just not as smooth to use. This is eye opening.
At the same time, though I agree Apple Watch has the best sleep tracking (and I work in the sleep space), the difference in sleep tracking compared to others probably isn't big enough to justify jumping through all these hoops, unless, like the author, you enjoy doing this sort of thing.
The Whoop sleep tracking is quite good, but a rather expensive (I think) subscription just to get data about a health function you have very little direct influence over.
The Xaoimi Bands are inexpensive, and from what I understand, also have good sleep tracking.
I also just came across this https://cardiomood.com/, which seems to be like a non-subscription, but rather expensive Whoop.
For years, I was an Apple Watch user: I assumed that all medium/top end trackers were the same, and that Apple Watch was pretty much the benchmark.
…but now that is have had the opportunity to use extensively Garmin watches, my experience is that they offer far superior accuracy, precision and technical details for activity tracking and sleeping than Apple Watch.
My picks would be in the following order:
1) Garmin high-end watches, they are truly a work of love
2) Aura ring, because of great convenience and reliability
3) Apple Watch, because they are great all-rounders
4) Coros, Suunto, Whoops, because they are highly reliable, but lack some of the smart functions
5) Withings, Fitbit, etc…, they are a solid option, but they generally lack distinctive features/capabilities
I would stay away from any brands offering super cheap products, due to privacy concerns and lower reliability and lack of advanced features.
I would love to hear more about your opinions on this as someone who has been experimenting with as a semi-serious runner after years of being Apple Watch exclusive.
What I see is benefits around battery life, form factor (buttons are awesome), and good native support for "compound metrics" like Endurance Score, Hill Score, Training Status, etc.
But when it comes to actual stats and metrics, Apple Watch feels superior in most ways. Garmin sleep tracking anecdotally feels much less accurate. It baffles me that it only shows pace to the nearest 5 seconds during a workout. It confuses me that it only shows a Vo2max estimate to zero decimal places.
Then, Apple Watch is at least 10x more customizable via third party apps. Want a Whoop-like experience with strain score, recovery score, etc.? Bevel and Athlytic are there. Want a much more in-depth and customizable workout experience? WorkOutdoors puts Garmin to shame here.
What am I missing that makes Garmin so pervasive, while Apple Watch is derided as "not a serious sports watch"?
I have both an Apple Watch 8 and the Garmin Fenix and I use the Fenix for sleep tracking. I find the Apple Watch to be too general with the stats. The Fenix gives a lot more detail. You can debate if the extra detail is useful or not. I also like the heart rate variability tracking with the Fenix (it seems to mirror how tire I feel pretty well). Lastly, the Fenix can hold a charge for several days. I can use it to sleep track and run and repeat and it charges quickly. If I sleep track with my Apple Watch, it may not have enough battery for the rest of the day. I run with both -- the Fenix for running specific tracking and the Apple for calling friends, listening to Audible, or podcasts.
I recently got a Fenix 7, but not for sleep tracking purposes. I find it ok. I definitely think it isn't great at measuring wakefulness at night, but I also have a very low HR and high HRV (while awake), which so this causes the margin for error in the device to be very low.
As I usually say, all of the devices are good enough. You're getting historical data about what your body did. You can't go back and change it anyway. I don't see real value in knowing my historical sleep data.
Not OP but I have a Fenix 7x. What happens very infrequently is that I would wake up during the night, and then be absolutely still (I'm trying to go back to sleep) except for checking my watch every 15-20mn. This does not get detected as "awake" the following morning.
I don't really care because I got this watch so I can upload a track and follow it while recording various metrics during 5+ days, and for this it works perfectly.
Data aside, neither are ideal. I can’t sleep with the Apple Watch because it needs to be charged while I sleep to get through the day, and the Fenix is too heavy for my wrist at night. I use an old Mi Band, which tracks approximate data that suits me.
This guy actively went the hard path. He didn’t need to do the for Kids pairing. It’s actually a case study in getting too in the weeds of a problem that’s tangential to what you’re trying to solve: good health reporting.
Some of the article you’d probably still want to do with Android, however (e.g. calendar syncing).
That said, I got an Apple Watch to attempt to replace my cell phone when leaving the house, but Apple seems to intentionally or nonintentionally wants to sabotage this use case.
Has it been a bad experience? I feel bad about how much time I spend staring at my phone, and I think the watch would be the ideal form factor for me, but I haven’t pulled the trigger because it feels silly spending more money on tech to reduce my dependency on tech
From what I've heard, Whoop (https://whoop.com) has the best sleep tracking, but it is subscription based and the monthly price is ridiculous for a device that has not even a screen
The thing I say about all of them is...what's the value in you having better tracking?
Let's say it's off by 4% and that you got 4% less deep sleep last night than your tracker says? What are you going to do about it? You can't change the data from the past anyway. They're all "good enough" I'd say.
The Oura ring does a lot more analytics. There's a "sleep score", a "readiness score", various algorithms to suggest an "optimal sleep time", etc.
The Apple Watch just records stuff and throws it in the Health app. That's it. They added a "vitals" app that mostly alerts you when the numbers it records are drastically different than the norm, but it's not really analyzing or suggesting anything.
I get the feeling that Apple thought there would be a whole ecosystem of apps that would analyze your sleep data, so they didn't need to build any of it into the watch or the health app itself.
Indeed, Apple gadgets work well if your body and lifestyle are close to what Apple tests for. Apple Watch is good “in general”, but for example it would regularly show me to be below sea level, not capture my heart rate (like measure it wildly off by 20-30 units) etc. AirPods as hearing aids — what if I'm not using an iPhone? So yes, the post is quite accurate and there really is no choice at the end, the wall of the garden is impossibly high.
FWIW, the Pixel Watch 3 45mm is basically equivalent to the Apple Watch in accuracy according to testing by the same YouTuber mentioned in the blog post [1]. And it works out of the box with Android. Personally I also like the form factor better, since it's round rather than square, and unlike the Apple Watch, it still has a working SpO2 sensor...
I should have made a better job of explaining that I have a de-googled android phone & even though I don't like Apple's business practices I would rather trust my data with Apple than Google.
Besides I bought the refurbished Apple Watch for third the price of Pixel Watch 3.
But I'm glad that Android users now have a good smart watch & there's competition in the space.
If you dislike both Apple and Google, then I wonder, with your skills, why you didn't consider using and improving PineTime with a GNU/Linux phone (Pinephone or Librem 5).
I just got a Pixel Watch 3 and find it impossible to understand how they have such an advanced monitoring on so many health aspects, including sleep cycles, but it doesn't support Smart Alarms (aka. Smart Wake or similar names), i.e. an alarm that is able to wake you up when you are in the lightest phase of sleep.
(just like what Fitbit bands themselves had, or what apps such as "Sleep as Android smart alarm" try to guesstimate)
That's weird. The fitbit bands that Google still sells do have that. They seem to be having a really hard time making the fitbit acquisition work in many ways so I guess that's not surprising.
> I just got a Pixel Watch 3 and find it impossible to understand how they have such an advanced monitoring on so many health aspects, including sleep cycles
The Fitbit integration with the Pixel watches is not great. The Fitbit support is even worse - it actually makes Google's support look decent by comparison, which is really saying something.
The killer app that Pixel is missing is the WorkOutDoors app for Apple Watch (gps tracking app with your path shown on offline cached vector maps). 80% of the time I bother wearing the watch is to use that app. And I will buy a Pixel watch for my Android-using partner if something equally good comes out for Pixel.
Agreed, I'm really not a fan of the square look, and the Pixel Watch looks great. I'd probably get one if Google sold a claspable mesh band like the one I use with my Galaxy Watch[1], or had better support for third-party bands. I don't get the obsession with magnetic bands; the one time I reluctantly gave one a chance, the watch fell and broke and I returned it for a replacement, then the replacement fell and broke and I had to get a refund.
Apple illegally cloned a smaller company's patented SpO2 sensor [1], which resulted in a US ban on Apple using the cloned SpO2 sensors. As of 2024 new Apple Watches in the US can't detect blood oxygen levels due to the ban.
Google didn't clone anything, and instead acquired a smaller company (Fitbit) that had the tech they wanted to put in their watches. So new Pixel Watches still have a working SpO2 sensor.
CalDAV and CardDAV are wonderful cross-platform protocols that I use every day (including on Apple Watch) and I hope they continue to be supported in the future.
In practice it's unlikely you're using CalDAV or CardDAV on Apple Watch, those data classes are synced from your paired phone unless you've set your watch up as a stand-alone device, which is rare.
I've been using an Apple Watch Ultra with my Pixel using some of the same hacks.
0. I use messaging apps like WhatsApp, and Messenger which are multi device. So I log into them on the home iPhone. (WA finally added 'login as companion device' on iOS only a year ago).
1. Pushover to get notifications from any other apps that don't support multi device. (Signal ugh). I used Buzzkill to do the pushing from the android devices. Very reliable once set up.
2. I use Google Voice for my calls and SMS so that was easy to get on iPhone. (No calls though. The watch doesn't support sip/voip calls except Apple's own FaceTime ugh)
3. I spent a year doing cellular on Watch. I joined various family members' premium plans of the big 3 US networks (as well asany MVNOs like Visible) to use cellular on the watch. I paid ~$10/mo via this route. All good.
But I stopped early this year because I found the cellular reliability to be just... piss poor garbage. (This is extensive use across US as well as international travel in Europe and Asia)
It really wasn't worth cellular I realized.
4. I use Apple laptops, so the "watch to unlock" feature is useful multiple times a day :)
> 0. I use messaging apps like WhatsApp, and Messenger which are multi device. So I log into them on the home iPhone. (WA finally added 'login as companion device' on iOS only a year ago).
> 1. Pushover to get notifications from any other apps that don't support multi device. (Signal ugh). I used Buzzkill to do the pushing from the android devices. Very reliable once set up.
> 2. I use Google Voice for my calls and SMS so that was easy to get on iPhone. (No calls though. The watch doesn't support sip/voip calls except Apple's own FaceTime ugh)
> 3. I spent a year doing cellular on Watch. I joined various family members' premium plans of the big 3 US networks (as well asany MVNOs like Visible) to use cellular on the watch. I paid ~$10/mo via this route. All good. But I stopped early this year because I found the cellular reliability to be just... piss poor garbage. (This is extensive use across US as well as international travel in Europe and Asia) It really wasn't worth cellular I realized.
Signal can be a bit weaker on the watch up here in Canada but is otherwise adequate. The problem with Apple Watch cellular when not using an iPhone to forward data is (1) battery life on LTE is terrible compared to data over Bluetooth, using wifi, or turning on airplane mode and (2) call forwarding from iPhone to Watch, on some Canadian carriers, is charged per minute due to a carrier bug (Telus) which you can call to get refunded but is still frustrating. Normally calls go to your iPhone and the voice is forwarded to the watch over Bluetooth, I believe. Basically the Apple Watch more often acts like an AirPod than a cell phone.
I end up carrying my iPhome with my Android phone to avoid this. I mount the iPhone to my bike/scooter when available using Quad Lock waterproof cases.
Thank you for sharing your techniques, much appreciated. I looked out for Buzzkill type apps and couldn't find any the FOSS space; instead I wrote a script in Termux.
Might try Buzzkill as it might be easier for those who aren't familiar with the terminal but I'm bit weary about the privacy implications especially since famous apps get acquired by shady actors all the time.
I've added blacklist in my script to prevent notifications from sensitive apps being sent over Pushover.
edit: Buzzkill depends upon Tasker for sending messages to pushover? That's a buzzkill(sorry) as Tasker heavily relies on GMS & not an option for de-googled phones.
Won't it vibrate both on your arm and in your pocket, then? I can't even stand when someone decides to send 10 one-line message, let alone when it happens where both my watch and phone vibrates..
(Seriously, why is vibration cooldown not a thing? I believe android will have something like this, but this should have been available for a decade! Like if I had 2 notification from someone 0.3 seconds ago, then I will surely not need a third one now)
Personally, this is actually how they got me – I used to use Android phones for many years, but found the Apple Watch so much more appealing than anything available from Google at the time that I made the switch.
If Apple was stupid enough to actually document this decision and the ecosystem concerns in written record, I wonder if they'll get dinged by the DMA for gatekeeping (again) over this.
From the US Department of Justice's lawsuit against Apple:
>Apple recognizes that driving users to purchase an Apple Watch, rather than a third-party cross-platform smartwatch, helps drive iPhone sales and reinforce the moat around its smartphone monopoly. For example, in a 2019 email the Vice President of Product Marketing for Apple Watch acknowledged that Apple Watch "may help prevent iPhone customers from switching."...Apple also recognizes that making Apple Watch compatible with Android would “remove[an] iPhone differentiator.”[1]
The lawsuit also alleges that Apple degrades APIs to hurt Third Party watch manufactures.
I'm not sure the Apple Watch has enough users, or is considered critical enough, to be covered by the DMA (iMessage, macOS, and iPad OS aren't either, for example).
In any case, this was all long before the DMA went into effect, so it would have to be a regular old antitrust case.
> Personally, this is actually how they got me – I used to use Android phones for many years, but found the Apple Watch so much more appealing than anything available from Google at the time that I made the switch.
Same. Maybe Android watches are better now—it’s been a few years since I looked at them—but at the time they were universally thicker and with worse battery life than the apple watch, which is already thicker than I like.
If you bought an Apple Watch and keep an iPhone connected to the internet, I'm not sure you've completely fulfilled your anti-Apple agenda. XD Still neat though.
You might also check in on Garmin watches. They have many of the same heart rate monitoring (though no automated emergency SOS) and work well with Android.
Really cool project, and thank you for writing it up so well!
My first question is "why" and the post answers that well (my paraphrasing): because Apple Watch is more accurate than anything else on the market, and health can be a matter of life and death.
OP is definitely an open source guy though so even if you'll never buy another Apple product (like myself) it's still a fascinating look at the current state of things!
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At the same time, though I agree Apple Watch has the best sleep tracking (and I work in the sleep space), the difference in sleep tracking compared to others probably isn't big enough to justify jumping through all these hoops, unless, like the author, you enjoy doing this sort of thing.
The Whoop sleep tracking is quite good, but a rather expensive (I think) subscription just to get data about a health function you have very little direct influence over.
The Xaoimi Bands are inexpensive, and from what I understand, also have good sleep tracking.
I also just came across this https://cardiomood.com/, which seems to be like a non-subscription, but rather expensive Whoop.
…but now that is have had the opportunity to use extensively Garmin watches, my experience is that they offer far superior accuracy, precision and technical details for activity tracking and sleeping than Apple Watch.
My picks would be in the following order:
1) Garmin high-end watches, they are truly a work of love
2) Aura ring, because of great convenience and reliability
3) Apple Watch, because they are great all-rounders
4) Coros, Suunto, Whoops, because they are highly reliable, but lack some of the smart functions
5) Withings, Fitbit, etc…, they are a solid option, but they generally lack distinctive features/capabilities
I would stay away from any brands offering super cheap products, due to privacy concerns and lower reliability and lack of advanced features.
What I see is benefits around battery life, form factor (buttons are awesome), and good native support for "compound metrics" like Endurance Score, Hill Score, Training Status, etc.
But when it comes to actual stats and metrics, Apple Watch feels superior in most ways. Garmin sleep tracking anecdotally feels much less accurate. It baffles me that it only shows pace to the nearest 5 seconds during a workout. It confuses me that it only shows a Vo2max estimate to zero decimal places.
Then, Apple Watch is at least 10x more customizable via third party apps. Want a Whoop-like experience with strain score, recovery score, etc.? Bevel and Athlytic are there. Want a much more in-depth and customizable workout experience? WorkOutdoors puts Garmin to shame here.
What am I missing that makes Garmin so pervasive, while Apple Watch is derided as "not a serious sports watch"?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_aS0Q188tY
As I usually say, all of the devices are good enough. You're getting historical data about what your body did. You can't go back and change it anyway. I don't see real value in knowing my historical sleep data.
I don't really care because I got this watch so I can upload a track and follow it while recording various metrics during 5+ days, and for this it works perfectly.
Because the garmin can function without requiring and acount/online nonsense, it does the sleep analysis and recommendations on the watch.
Some of the article you’d probably still want to do with Android, however (e.g. calendar syncing).
That said, I got an Apple Watch to attempt to replace my cell phone when leaving the house, but Apple seems to intentionally or nonintentionally wants to sabotage this use case.
I used an Oura for a while, and it is quite good.
The thing I say about all of them is...what's the value in you having better tracking?
Let's say it's off by 4% and that you got 4% less deep sleep last night than your tracker says? What are you going to do about it? You can't change the data from the past anyway. They're all "good enough" I'd say.
The Apple Watch just records stuff and throws it in the Health app. That's it. They added a "vitals" app that mostly alerts you when the numbers it records are drastically different than the norm, but it's not really analyzing or suggesting anything.
I get the feeling that Apple thought there would be a whole ecosystem of apps that would analyze your sleep data, so they didn't need to build any of it into the watch or the health app itself.
1: https://youtu.be/Jr4p66vSmLY
Besides I bought the refurbished Apple Watch for third the price of Pixel Watch 3.
But I'm glad that Android users now have a good smart watch & there's competition in the space.
(just like what Fitbit bands themselves had, or what apps such as "Sleep as Android smart alarm" try to guesstimate)
The Fitbit integration with the Pixel watches is not great. The Fitbit support is even worse - it actually makes Google's support look decent by comparison, which is really saying something.
Deleted Comment
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20210622043132/https://www.welly...
Google didn't clone anything, and instead acquired a smaller company (Fitbit) that had the tech they wanted to put in their watches. So new Pixel Watches still have a working SpO2 sensor.
1: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/18/1225432506/apple-watch-blood-...
You're welcome.
CalDAV and CardDAV are wonderful cross-platform protocols that I use every day (including on Apple Watch) and I hope they continue to be supported in the future.
One day, hopefully!
I'm the author of this post, I assumed Apple still has support for these protocols because of legacy business systems.
I hope that the support for interoperable protocols continue to remain in future versions of Apple Operating Systems.
I've been using an Apple Watch Ultra with my Pixel using some of the same hacks.
0. I use messaging apps like WhatsApp, and Messenger which are multi device. So I log into them on the home iPhone. (WA finally added 'login as companion device' on iOS only a year ago). 1. Pushover to get notifications from any other apps that don't support multi device. (Signal ugh). I used Buzzkill to do the pushing from the android devices. Very reliable once set up. 2. I use Google Voice for my calls and SMS so that was easy to get on iPhone. (No calls though. The watch doesn't support sip/voip calls except Apple's own FaceTime ugh) 3. I spent a year doing cellular on Watch. I joined various family members' premium plans of the big 3 US networks (as well asany MVNOs like Visible) to use cellular on the watch. I paid ~$10/mo via this route. All good. But I stopped early this year because I found the cellular reliability to be just... piss poor garbage. (This is extensive use across US as well as international travel in Europe and Asia) It really wasn't worth cellular I realized.
4. I use Apple laptops, so the "watch to unlock" feature is useful multiple times a day :)
> 0. I use messaging apps like WhatsApp, and Messenger which are multi device. So I log into them on the home iPhone. (WA finally added 'login as companion device' on iOS only a year ago).
> 1. Pushover to get notifications from any other apps that don't support multi device. (Signal ugh). I used Buzzkill to do the pushing from the android devices. Very reliable once set up.
> 2. I use Google Voice for my calls and SMS so that was easy to get on iPhone. (No calls though. The watch doesn't support sip/voip calls except Apple's own FaceTime ugh)
> 3. I spent a year doing cellular on Watch. I joined various family members' premium plans of the big 3 US networks (as well asany MVNOs like Visible) to use cellular on the watch. I paid ~$10/mo via this route. All good. But I stopped early this year because I found the cellular reliability to be just... piss poor garbage. (This is extensive use across US as well as international travel in Europe and Asia) It really wasn't worth cellular I realized.
I end up carrying my iPhome with my Android phone to avoid this. I mount the iPhone to my bike/scooter when available using Quad Lock waterproof cases.
Dead Comment
Might try Buzzkill as it might be easier for those who aren't familiar with the terminal but I'm bit weary about the privacy implications especially since famous apps get acquired by shady actors all the time.
I've added blacklist in my script to prevent notifications from sensitive apps being sent over Pushover.
edit: Buzzkill depends upon Tasker for sending messages to pushover? That's a buzzkill(sorry) as Tasker heavily relies on GMS & not an option for de-googled phones.
(Seriously, why is vibration cooldown not a thing? I believe android will have something like this, but this should have been available for a decade! Like if I had 2 notification from someone 0.3 seconds ago, then I will surely not need a third one now)
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Personally, this is actually how they got me – I used to use Android phones for many years, but found the Apple Watch so much more appealing than anything available from Google at the time that I made the switch.
>Apple recognizes that driving users to purchase an Apple Watch, rather than a third-party cross-platform smartwatch, helps drive iPhone sales and reinforce the moat around its smartphone monopoly. For example, in a 2019 email the Vice President of Product Marketing for Apple Watch acknowledged that Apple Watch "may help prevent iPhone customers from switching."...Apple also recognizes that making Apple Watch compatible with Android would “remove[an] iPhone differentiator.”[1]
The lawsuit also alleges that Apple degrades APIs to hurt Third Party watch manufactures.
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...
In any case, this was all long before the DMA went into effect, so it would have to be a regular old antitrust case.
Same. Maybe Android watches are better now—it’s been a few years since I looked at them—but at the time they were universally thicker and with worse battery life than the apple watch, which is already thicker than I like.
You might also check in on Garmin watches. They have many of the same heart rate monitoring (though no automated emergency SOS) and work well with Android.
(Sorry to hear about your friend's passing.)
My first question is "why" and the post answers that well (my paraphrasing): because Apple Watch is more accurate than anything else on the market, and health can be a matter of life and death.
OP is definitely an open source guy though so even if you'll never buy another Apple product (like myself) it's still a fascinating look at the current state of things!