r/olleeWatch

I recently came across the Ollee watch project and I immediately fell in love with the concept. I’m probably similar to many of you, I hate planned obsolescence, I love reliable hardware and software, I gravitate to simple over complex, and I love tinkering.

From reading the roadmap, and also the Reddit and Discord, I know that a limited, but simple to use sdk is planned, and I’m extremely excited for it. I’m simply making this post to offer a perspective into why I think a continued focus in community driven development, and a potential road to an open platform would be very beneficial to this product. Reminder that this is just my opinion and experience, I’m not trying to lecture or demand anything at all.

Audience

I would immediately label those that bought the Ollee mod kit as tinkerers. Most consumers wouldn’t be interested in doing even the small effort required to install and set it up. There’s unlimited options, yet people choose this. The overlap of hardware/software enthusiasts and engineers in this community is most likely quite large. So many professional and hobbyist software engineers are completely burned out with complex software and are looking for something simple to tinker with.

Longevity

Speaking of overlap, I think it’s safe to say most people who buy Casio watches care about longevity. Many of us purposefully seek out simple products that we can “buy for life”. I’d love to give my kid my Ollee watch v1. And I want to thank Gregor for designing it with this is mind. Most of the functionality isn’t tied to the app at all. The next step in that is opening up the project so that the community can keep it going indefinitely. When we’re on v5, Gregor can focus on new cool features while the community maintains support for legacy versions! I’m a mobile developer myself and I know how difficult maintaining support for mobile apps are. You have store requirements and reviews, constantly changing mobile sdks, complex testing etc.

Now imagine this project with 10x more users. More bug reports, more os versions and devices to support and suddenly you spend more time on tech debt than the fun stuff. Having an open ecosystem makes it easier to say “we’ve decided not to support X” and let the community fill in the gaps.

Value

I’d argue opening this project up as much as possible would actually serve to PROTECT the IP more than hurt it. You know what’s harder to copy than hardware or software? Brand and ecosystem. Casio watches are a good example of brand, the fakes are almost identical to the real product, yet you see countless threads from customers motivated to make sure they got the real McCoy.

However, a project like Ollee has the potential to create something Casio simply will never attempt even with their new “smartphone link” watches. An open ecosystem for customizing your watch to your hearts content. This is the type of thing that keeps people coming back. If I know there’s an entire Ollee community of interesting programs, I’m more likely to find something that appeals to me and stay to see what’s next.

Open Source vs. Open platform

Let’s be honest, a lot of open source purists are annoying. Many people don’t understand that open sourcing a product like this would be difficult. But does it need to be 100% open source to provide the previously mentioned benefits? Absolutely not, I’d argue it doesn’t even need to be mostly open source.

I think what many of us want care about the most is an open platform

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_platform

I respect the Ollee hardware and software as IP that the creator has full worked hard on and has full control over. But that can exist simultaneously with a completely open platform to build on if your tinkerer heart desires to.

A think a feature complete sdk would already be more than enough to satiate most people. Possibly in the future maybe a simple way to flash your own cfw as well. Most will never do it, some will try their luck and brick their Ollee, it’s part of learning!

Hi everyone.

So I recently got my ollee watch and for the most part I’m quite happy with it! Love the app, the functions, ect…

But one thing that has started to annoy me is that the watch at random times will make a beep sound and then the letters LAP start flashing. It also has started feeling like the beeps have become more common every day.

From the research that I did, I understand that this is bluetooth trying to sync to the phone? Not sure if im correct, so correct me if I’m wrong.

But please could someone help me with this issue as it has started to drive me nuts. I toggled on the “bluetooth always on” setting thinking it will help, it didn’t.

So please, if anyone knows, please share the fix

Sailfish claims to run 99% of Android apps, so I'm wondering if anyone has tried using the Ollee Watch app with it?

I'm sick of my current smartwatch mainly because of the battery life. I find that 99% of my usage is controlling my music. I use it at work and when driving to pause, skip, fast forward, etc, for podcasts and music.

Does Ollee support this?

Hi! I wanted to ask if the code is open source or there is an API or something like that so that we can make our own integrations/apps.

I wouldn’t mind paying for the kit if I could then not depend on the stock app and eventually make integrations with my home server or other services.

So does anyone know if that’s a possibility. It’s really the only thing that’s stopping me from buying.