Asteroids travel steadily, occasionally leaving observable distance. It has been a while since our last release, and now it's finally here!
AsteroidOS 2.0 has arrived, bringing major features and improvements gathered during its journey through community space. Always-on-Display, expanded support for more watches, new launcher styles, customizable quick settings, significant performance increases in parts of the User Interface, and enhancements to our synchronization clients are just some highlights of what to expect.
Optimized Rendering
Significant performance improvements have been made to the User Interface, resulting in smoother animations and transitions.
Battery Life Improvements
Various optimizations have been implemented to extend battery life during daily use.
Stability Fixes
Numerous bug fixes and stability improvements have been applied across the system.
Since 1.0 we added support for the following watches:
And partial support for the following watches:
We have created an "Experimental" category in our watch gallery for the above 5 watches since we do not consider those suitable for daily use. We will however continue to provide install images for these watches, and we welcome new contributors with fresh ideas to help improve support! We also continue to monitor supported watches and for example recently demoted the Sony Smartwatch 3 (tetra) due to unresolved hardware support issues.
The Samsung Gear 2 (rinato) is our first watch supported with a mainline Linux kernel and therefore without the use of libhybris. The Asus Zenwatch 2 (sparrow) also has very basic support for running on a mainline Linux kernel.
For a complete list of supported devices and installation instructions, please visit our installation guide.
Apart from adding new watches, the community has also been actively enhancing the support for our existing range of watches. Visit our newly created feature matrix page to find out about the detailed support level for your watch.
Thanks to Noodlez, initial AsteroidOS support has been added to Gadgetbridge version 0.73.0.
Jozef Mlich has added AsteroidOS support to Adam Piggs Amazfish. Initially developed for SailfishOS, Amazfish is now also available in kirigami flavour for linux desktops.
After our initial release StefWe created Telescope a sync client for UBports.
This release would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of our community contributors. We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who reported issues, submitted patches, and provided feedback during the development cycle.
Over the years, the AsteroidOS community has expanded its reach, with community translators adding over 20 languages to the AsteroidOS Weblate. Translating into your local language is the easiest way to get involved. Your help is most valuable to make AsteroidOS fit for use in your region.
Watchface creation has been a popular community activity lately. We are happy to present the new and comprehensive watchfaces creation and design guide. It is garnished with testing and deployment scripts to simplify the process further. Our community came up with funny and beautiful new watchfaces. Those are all collected in the unofficial watchfaces repository.
moWerk has contributed a variety of watchfaces. Two highlights are the minimalistic pulsedot and a classic Monty Python inspired silly walks watchface.
MagneFire did show-off Doom, Super Tux Kart, gpSP and other emulated games on his watch. The native 2048 port called diamonds was recently included into the stock set of apps.
Dodoradio worked on a few unusual watches, like the LG Watch W7 with its physical hands to be taken into account. And the Casio WSD-FXX series sporting multifunctional secondary displays. Along with some more conventional ports such as the Fossil Gen5 and Polar M600. For watches with GPS, he contributed a Map app with waypoint functionality to the community repository. His initial version of the often requested asteroid-health app is already capable of automatically tracking steps and heartrate with minimal impact on battery life.
Beroset implemented the new Nightstand mode. In addition to his efforts in maintaining the build tools, Beroset has also developed host-tools which make it easier to work on watches from a Linux host. Furthermore, he has included a user-friendly GUI for deploying watchfaces and created asteroid-weatherfetch, a convenient app that downloads weather data using the watches IP connection.
PostmarketOS now offers our launcher and core apps, thanks to postmarketOS developer PureTryOut, who moved our buildsystem from qmake to cmake along the way.
The program lcd-tools by lecris and MagneFire was originally developed to control the secondary LCD on the TicWatch Pro. And got extended by dodoradio and beroset to make use of many more features the Casio secondary displays offer.
MagneFire, jrt, moWerk and beroset joined the AsteroidOS team.
Our website asteroidos.org has seen a major content extension.
The creator of the unofficial Subreddit gave us full access, making it an official channel alongside our Mastodon account.
As we already mentioned in a previous blog post, we moved all our communication from freenode to Matrix and Libera.chat. You are invited to join the AsteroidOS Matrix channel using this link. https://matrix.to/#/#Asteroid:matrix.org
With 2.0 we introduce a community repository, to improve discoverability and simplify the installation of precompiled packages, while building the foundation for a possible graphical software center in the future. Currently, the repository consists of a few debugging tools, community watchfaces, games and emulators. Developers are welcome to create pull requests on the meta-community repo for packaging.
After moving our infrastructure to a larger server, we have seen an increase in the frequency of nightly releases. However, it is worth noting that completely rebuilding all packages for all 30 watch system images still takes almost a week. Therefore, we can expect the nightlies to be ready on weekends.
Interested in contributing to AsteroidOS? Whether you're a developer, designer, or enthusiast, there are many ways to get involved:
Your participation helps make AsteroidOS better for everyone.
Ready to experience the latest features and improvements? Download AsteroidOS 2.0 from our official website and follow the installation instructions for your device.
Thank you for your continued support. We hope you enjoy AsteroidOS 2.0!
As you might have noticed, the current releases linked on the installation pages have feature parity with the 2.0 release. At some point, we decided to switch from our stable 1.0 release to a quasi 1.1 nightly rolling release, as the 1.0 release became too old to maintain. In the future, we would like to change our release cycle to offer more frequent stable releases. A stable release will always be stable. But not too old to no longer be maintainable.
For the future, we are going to set up a roadmap for features we would like to see in an eventual next release. Based on recent early community work, we might see features like: