WearOS support in microG - Part 1
Clockwork
Recently, I bought myself a Pixel Watch 1, because it seemed somewhat developer friendly. I never thought that I wanted a smartwatch, but one evening I talked to a friend of mine about her Galaxy Watch 4. Because I'm a first-aider (as is she), I'm interested in my medical stats, so the smartwatches' ability to show me my heart-rate was enough for me to buy one. I got one for about 80€ on eBay.
Normally, the watch communicates via Bluetooth with the phone. This is handled by Google Play Services (GMS). Because I want as little Google on my phone, as possible, I have an open source replacement for GMS called microG installed. I tried to connect the watch to my phone, believing microG can handle it just fine as it always does (microG is amazing btw.), but in this case I had no luck. It's not implemented. When I looked on GitHub, I found this issue which motivated me to try and get WearOS support working on microG (of cause the big bounty helps).
Just do it!
That is why I started to collect as much Information about WearOS as I can, and made this research repo. There's still a lot of stuff I have to write down, but writing is, unfortunately, the most boring part about this whole endeavor. If you'd like to help me, feel free to create an issue or a pull request on the research repo.
That's it for now. If I succeed, more might follow, but don't hold your breath 😉