This is totally doable! The Always on Display screen can have colors and those do not impact the battery life much. Nothing hinders you to show a full color as AoD. There are some watches however that only support 4 colors in AoD mode. Namely the ASUS ones. If you are serious about developing such a watchface, come to our matrix chat for more tips where to start.
QML runs interpreted at runtime and Qt is very close to native C++, so both are actually quite lean and fast on these devices — the overhead is surprisingly small compared to full Android Wear, and we've tuned it heavily over the years to keep battery and UI responsiveness solid.
If you see devices lagging, like the sawfish (Huawei Watch 2), its usually due to updating the android base to a newer one as the manufacturer planned for and losing some of those optimizations in the process.
While the PineTime/Infinitime is an awesome project everyone in our community roots for, the hardware platforms are totally different. The PineTime is microcontroller based and works on just 64KB memory and 512KB flash. AsteroidOS is a linux distro tailored for devices with SoC, half a gig of memory and >2GB storage.
Arguably its much smarter on many levels to use the microcontroller approach for the rather simple smartwatch task. But somehow these full SoC general purpose computing smartwatches have been produced and we as linux people slipped into the niche of seizing those.
Perfect! Our Ring is libhybris, Sauron is the binary blob drivers the manufacturers cursed us with, and we're still hobbling toward mainline Mordor one old kernel backport at a time. One does not simply upstream a smartwatch driver.
Fair suspicion in 2026 — but we actually started drafting that announcement in early 2023 before first committing it here: https://github.com/jrtberlin/aos2.0-post. As a non native speaker i sure ran my commits through grammar polishing multiple times over the years. And i am genuinely curious now what to avoid to not sound like an LLM if you could dig out one or two examples.
I wonder if they meant this HN post (the OP), rather than https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/? The latter doesn't seem LLM-written to me, but the HN post does.
Full disclosure, i spent ~3 hours crafting this post to hit the tone i wanted to convey and am kind of proud of the wrist-size linux banger i came up with. I am usually not good with writing since it takes me ages and i might be a bit over sensitive right now. All i wanted was to spare you all the rocky grammar as a cherry on top. To now find that the polished version triggers your "its (completely?) Ai written" sensor. Lesson learned i guess.
FWIW as someone who sadly has about 10% of his brain constantly engaged in AI detection when I read HN, absolutely nothing about the announcement struck me as feeling AI generated.
(I feel guilty for pointing it out but I guess it's actually a compliment in this context: I even saw a beautifully reassuring mis-conjugated verb elsewhere on the website. I wonder if LLMs will have to start injecting these errors to give us an authentic feel. Maybe they already have).
I think we are at a point now where just coz AI is so prevalent, every post on any programming forum will have at least one comment saying "AI slop".
I hadn't opened the article yet and was just browsing comments over my cereal when I saw this and thought "ugh, amother one?" and went to check for myself
I didn't get an LLM vibe at all. Looking for it specifically, the bullet point about UI improvements is a candidate; the sentence following "mediawiki" could be an autocompletion; maybe the first sentence of the download section... but they're also all plausibly just a bit 'marketing team worded', so not necessarily LLM-sounding. And even if an LLM made suggestions to some small parts like these, who cares? There aren't any slop sections that waste your time, this is just like using a thesaurus — if these parts were LLM suggestions in the first place, which I don't actually expect because then there should be more of it
This type of post very poorly lends itself for auto-writing anyway. It'll put emphasis on the wrong aspects and not come out as intended, at least in my experience it's more work coaxing it to good results. It can be helpful not to start from a blank page but that's about it, I rarely find a sentence among the output that's fully usable as-is
I was referring to the text of the HN post. The second and third paragraphs in particular, but most of it, really. If you didn’t use an LLM for that then congratulations, you’ve successfully nailed the Silicon Valley LinkedIn marketing guru zeitgeist which LLMs seem to gravitate towards.
With the latest devices its usually a problem that manufacturers choose to omit the usb pin outs in favor of water resistance and wireless charging. Making them a challenge to flash and still wear afterwards.
Another issue is that we currently need to rely on libhybris for quick porting process that employs the android drivers. And the new devices run android versions that libhybris can not handle yet. Its just a slow process on all fronts but we are actually releasing this 2.0 publicly to possibly interest more developers.
We have implemented a wifi toggle in the quickpanel with 2.0. But the wifi credentials still need to be entered into connmanctl on the cli. As soon as you got wifi set up and connected, you can already now sync weather data usin asteroid-weatherfetch. But right, wifi usually uses up to 30% more power and should be enabled selectively.
For the postmarket question, yes, it is our longterm goal to mainline watches, which we are sort of doing in coorperation with the postmarket guys. But thats a humongous task and part of the idea of this 2.0 release is to interest capable contributors to push things further ;)
Usually the Ticwatch Pro 2018/2020 (catfish) is widely available since it was a popular model. The more recent version Ticwatch Pro 3 (rubyfish/rover) is freshly ported and not as well supported as the first Ticwatch Pro yet. I bought one new in box just this week from german ebay for 70€.
We got a Team member in the US/ML who is hoarding watches and seems to have no problem acquiring them :D I wish you luck.
