Limiting the features of the watch

General General Discussion
1

Hi,

I would like to buy a watch for my kid. It need to support making phone calls, have a GPS and battery live of over 24h and be relatively cheap (as the kid may loose it). It would also be good if it was water resistant (splashes, not swimming).

I’ve seen those typical Chinese Kids watches (or multitude of clones claiming to be made by local producer) and I’m not impressed. I thought that maybe a full android watch would be a good alternative. The only problem is - I don’t want my kid to watch YouTube or play games on the watch. Having a full Android cmeans I could write some custom application/service that would let me manage the watch remotely (like querying it’s position or adding some remainders etc) without exposing my kids data to the cloud.

I thought about following options:

  1. rooting the device and removing all the apps I don’t want, or
  2. installing some custom ROM, maybe AOSP based that will be built with only basic applications, or
  3. creating a custom launcher that will only show whitelisted activities

My understanding is that option 3 should be possible on any FAW, is this correct?

The launcher for the watch is being written in the same way as for phones (i.e. in theory I could install any launcher that works on phone, of course the UX will be terrible but the principle is the same), is this correct?

For option 2, are there any custom ROMs for Android watches that I could use and they are stable enough for a daily usage? Which watches would be best for such option?

For option 1, are those watches easy to root? Is there something I should watch out for?

So far I was thinking about getting the Lemfo lem10. Do you have better suggestions?

2

yes

yes

there’s no custom rom available yet, but the openwatch project is working on making a android 10 rom which will come for the mt6739 watches first.

In my opinion, yes, they’re easy to root. Just patch the boot image with magisk manager and flash it with sp flash tools in download only mode

Some watches have different versions with for example different screen, so just make sure you get the right firmware version

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3

Thanks for your answers. Just to make sure - the ADB on the watches works just like with phones (over USB cable)? I.E. The magnetic “charging cable” has also data connection and it is not only for charging?

Also are there any models in the <130 USD price that are worth checking? The Kispet Prime SE seemed like a good option but it’s to big for the kid, I think.

4

If you like the Kospet I recommend the optimus or optimus pro watch if size is an issue. the display is only 1.39 the watch is almost 1cm smaller than the prime. you can find everything here (root, TWRP, custom kernel). The difference between the plain and pro versions is only $ 10 so PRO is better.

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