I deleted my account and uninstalled the app a few days ago - just in time to prevent google from slurping up my health data.
I purchased a Mi Band 5 for $35 which is a vastly better device than fitbit equivalents for a quarter of the price. You can use it without data being sent to the cloud if you use the open source package GadgetBridge.
> I purchased a Mi Band 5 for $35 which is a vastly better device than fitbit equivalents for a quarter of the price. You can use it without data being sent to the cloud if you use the open source package GadgetBridge.
Gadgetbridge is mentioned regularly in these threads, thank you! Privacy is one of our main goals. We support quite a few bands and watches and the list of devices and features is growing.
We are also happy for contributing members, so if you think that your movement data and notifications should remain private and can do some Android development, stop by, we are at Codeberg.
https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge
There's also "Notify & Fitness for Mi Band" for Android [1] which I used, which was ace. Packed full of advanced features like ability to change what calorie / basal metabolic rate calculations were used, export of the data locally / dropbox, export to google fit + strava etc., no dependency on Xiaomi's servers. Closed source, though. But appears to be one single persons personal project.
Those products are awesome if you want a lower-end fitness tracker. Originally I bought a Mi Band 4 because I saw it reported itself as a bluetooth HR accessory, meaning you could get continuous heart rate on bluetooth if you paired your device -- whereas FitBit's protocol was encrypted and proprietary. Did some cool stuff with that (a shirt with an LED matrix screen that pulsed at the wearers heart rate!)
Wouldn't say the hardware is "vastly better", I found the continuous heart rate monitoring to be a bit sluggish -- i.e. it averaged out HR over a longer period than the fitbits I've had did, so you were less likely to detect the peaks and recovery periods during excercise. Otherwise it was much of a muchness, but cheaper. I imagine the cheaper HW probably meant corners were cut with the sensors and firmware, but being hardly the athlete I didn't care outside of heart rate sensing.
Also a fan of the Mi Band. I have a Mi Band 2, and just bought a Mi Band 5 for a family member. At $35 USD it's a good entry device (with mid level features) for those new to fitness tracking.
I purchased a Mi Band 5 for $35 which is a vastly better device than fitbit equivalents for a quarter of the price. You can use it without data being sent to the cloud if you use the open source package GadgetBridge.