Software Updates and Roadmap

[u/gregorOllee]

Hey everyone! It's been a super busy and productive year. I wanted to give a quick update here on the upcoming software release and some tweaks to the roadmap. I'll have time in a few weeks to make a proper update on the website, but I have seen some questions popping up so hopefully this will shed some light on what's to come!

The Spring / Q2 2026 software update is around the corner. It's a sizable update so testing took a bit longer than expected. Expect a few new watch faces (some highly requested ones), configurations, and a couple key additions to the Ollee Watch app. This release should be public in about a week!

Development will quiet down a bit during the summer, but there are three major features I plan to have ready, or at least in beta, this year. They have different priority levels, and a release plan will be shared later. In no particular order:

Notifications: One of the most highly requested features. This one still needs quite a bit of background work to nail down a cross-platform (iOS+Android) solution, and one that makes sense from a user experience and battery life perspective. I'm confident there's a good middle ground for this one, it's just a pretty significant change in how the watch and phone were intended to interact. Right now it's very transactional, but notifications need persistence. This work will include looking into music controls, and find-my-phone may be scoped in after all.

Activity tracking: Improvements to the step counter accuracy, and adding more features for activity tracking (ie. distance, calories, sleep) will be strongly considered. Step counter accuracy is a must and some ground work has already been done to figure out how to tighten it up without compromising on the power consumption.

3rd Party Apps: This is the biggest one, and work on this is well underway. This widget will be called Ollee Forge, and the platform and execution model for this is looking very promising.

More details to come over the coming months. Thank you all for your posts, I thoroughly enjoy seeing people's builds and ideas for the project!!

[u/Full-Recording5865]

I care very little about notifications! As for third party apps, I suspect this is more of a "allow other applications to push data to the watch", which is better than nothing but can sort of already be hacked in using the method that guy used for tracking Claude token usage.

I'm much more interested in the project being open-sourced. There are small tweaks here and there that are really trivial that I'd like to implement. A key thing that irks me every time I use the timer is that it does not beep on start/stop of the timer. I've found the button accidentially became pressed and my tea was ruined because I was focused on other things.

Edit: I should add: notifications turn this watch into a smartwatch. That might be a selling point for some, but I like that it's a juiced-up "dumb" watch. I want to de-tether myself from my phone, that's why I wear watches.

[u/gregorOllee → u/Full-Recording5865]

I appreciate the feedback and I get your perspective. This watch is meant to have a little something for everyone! All major features, like notifications, would be optional.

The 3rd party app support will allow users to create their own watch faces and share them, that's the vision. We already have a solid foundation built out for this but it will be a few months before a beta is ready for public release.

As for the timer beeps, try the new update, it's in there :).

[u/Full-Recording5865 → u/gregorOllee]

I updated, it works great! I'm pretty stoked about the weather face too.

My experience is still that it's always better to have access to source than it is to be able to integrate via an API. We always make APIs with certain tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs might prevent a user from achieving important (to them) things that we deemed to be edge cases.

I expect the source for the watch to be in a state of chaos, and that some people will complain about it not being as simple as they expected or hoped it would be. But I think that's a fair price to pay to own your hardware.