I wear a Garmin watch every day. It's great. But... I don't love the high price and the fact that the battery isn't easily replaceable. (Feels like Garmin would rather you buy a new watch instead.) There's a huge lane for Pebble to be the torch bearer for the Right-to-Repair movement (especially given it's whole story arc so far.)

Can you use Garmin without their proprietary app? And if not, is it at least working without some sort of cloud services?

Too many products nowadays are bound to some sort of online checks and that is even worse than "battery not replaceable". The second is much easier to circumvent than the first (dependence on cloud infra). And ofc the data security. I will never be comfortable with giving corpos my medical data.

Yesterday's "oops we bricked it remotely, no user interaction required" definitely doesn't inspire confidence - even though it was not intentional and was since fixed.