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Comment by rini17 | Hacker News Reader

Why nobody is eating the market by making affordable (sub $50) hackable watches? The most widespread MT626x devices are so paranoidly closed that even changing clock face involves mucking with ROM image using third-party tools. Installing apps? Forget about that.

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Curious to what you think that would achieve market wise. Hackable does not seem to matter much. Everything in the sub $100 dollar range I've tried is crappy (battery life, as well as functionality wise) because that's all that particular market segment is willing to pay for, those that want access to one of the viable app ecosystems seem to be prepared to pay the usual markup. Don't get me wrong, I love tinkering with the hardware form factor myself but that doesn't mean I'll create apps, no less an app ecosystem, that make this more viable to the manufacturing side of things. Maybe low cost devices with access to the Android ecosystem become more viable in the future but other than that changing this niche seems relatively hard and producing hackable devices historically goes counter to the approach of any company I can think of in the space. I could see somebody like Arduino creating something appealing and approachable for the rest of us but that would be unlikely to make a dent market wise.

What sort of 3rd party apps do you find yourself using?

Looking through my list the only two I (barely) use are PCalc and DarkSky, which if I didn’t have, I’d just use the stock calculator and weather apps. I’ve tried maybe 20 other apps and none are compelling.

None really I'm afraid. I enjoy having notifications on my wrist sometimes but most days I just slap on a regular watch instead since they're more fashion than utility item for me honestly.

Pine is working on a watch but by no means will they be eating the market.

https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

I wish it had GPS. All of the Garmin devices have basically the same hardware, but the Forerunner 245, 745, 945, and Fenix have a price difference of a factor of 4 - not to mention the 35/25 on the used/refurbished market. Within the Fenix lineup, product segmentation is exactly the "printer with the speed inhibitor turned off" [1].

A jailbreak on the Garmin devices that enabled Fenix Pro features on the entry-level models would also eat the market.

I actually played with the TI 430-Chronos smartwatch development platform [2] a few years ago, but all the interesting features to me are tied to GPS.

Note: I currently am coveting the Fenix 6 Pro for my hobbies and covering it for hitting the right point in the Casio-F91 to smartphone-on-my-wrist continuum. I just wish some of its software features were available cheaper.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

[2]: https://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos

Yeah my killer feature is a microphone, which the PineTime doesn't have...

To take your question literally, it's probably because you don't eat the market by offering hackability. It doesn't hurt, and it can probably only help, but it's not going to help very much when you're talking about the mass market.

Well, look what I just found on AliExpress:

https://aliexpress.com/item/4000527495064.html

It looks like ESP32 + display + real-time-clock + gyroscope/accelerometer/compass + battery + buttons, all inside fitness tracker body. Just waiting for whatever you can code it into

How long does the 80mA Battery last? The ESP32 is a thirsty chip.

They do. It's called the Seiko 4R35 ;) edit: this is a stupid watch joke

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