Any chance to have reverse engineering of smart ring RingConn?
Someone able to do that should do it under payment, of course! I strongly disposed to pay to have it instead of be forced to use their app and online connection!
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If you have a bounty fund in mind, explicitly state the amount and currency. Otherwise simply get rid of the smart ring and move on.
No idea how much it could cost! Any idea? 
However much you value liberty; you tell us.
Product link?
How does the ring communicate with the app?
What functionality does the ring offer?
What functionality does the app offer?
Is there equivalent alternative hardware i.e. that offers similar functionality but without the need to run a blackbox, privacy-destroying app?
What does the ring cost?
Let’s do some small brainstorming, roughly speaking the cost would be something like :
A : Cost per month of the motivated developer, able to retro-engineer those kind of device
B : Time to spend, working on it
C : How it will cost you
A * B = C
Let’s say you pay one person with a base salary of 50k / year (could be much more or less depending of the country, I don’t even give the currency)
A = 50000 / 12 = 4166
Let’s say during the development, the developer will spend :
- 1 month testing and understanding how the device works, how to interact with it, and retrieve data correctly, without damaging it
- 1 month to make an optimized GUI to interact with it
- 1 month to solve bugs, to make the GUI more friendly, to add some indirect functionalities
- 1 month because … unplanned delays
B = 4
4166 * 4 = 16664
Now, best case, 4 month later, you found your competent developer, everything went well and you have your RingConn working with linux (will it be maintained?)
Congratulation, you paid 16k so RingConn has nothing to do to make their product compatible with linux
But why not go an other way ? RingConn is a crowdfunding product raised with around 1 million dollars budget
I think the first best thing to do is to contact RingConn, and ask them :
- if they would make it compatible with GNU/Linux ?
- if they would make it FOSS ?
- if they will do it if you fund them ? and if so, what would be the right amount ?
- If not can they provide some technical documentations to DIY ?
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Or using crowdfunding to finance gnu/Linux smart ring!!
In effect, also L5 born thanks to crowdfunding!
Thank you, fralb5!! You gave me a great idea!!
Well if you are lucky enough, you can refund the product and let everyone else know later on when your GNU/Linux smart ring campaign is ready to start. I would only take interest in it myself if there are accessible hardware kill switches.
I think it’s almost impossible to have kill switches in a ring (although making a ring bulky!)
the kill switch is : you get it off your finger 
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This is your campaign, feel free to decide what you believe is a marketable product to whomever target audience you are wanting to reach. I am merely mentioning what attributes I would give attention to if I wanted to pledge to another GNU/Linux-related product campaign. There are multiple other qualities I also look for, but hardware kill switches are a strict requirement if the product can potentially be an IoT device.
Just a “crazy” idea: why it has to be “smart”? “Old” untrackable Bluetooth ring (without those trackable IDs) would also do the job. No need to share anything over the internet or any cloud, everything can be handled local on phone.
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Or, simply put, if it is not on F-Droid, you are the product.
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Hopefully it only needs one kill switch but that might depend on what your requirements are.
Simple case: one switch that just switches the damn thing off (cuts power) / one switch that disables Bluetooth and sensors.
Or: kill switch only for Bluetooth (sensors remain active but ring is radio-silent)
Or: separate kill switches for Bluetooth and sensors.
Perhaps the manufacturer would argue that many people do not backup their phone and/or the phone could be subject to being lost or stolen - hence it is better to store the data somewhere else.
A more reasonable app though would give you the choice of where the data is stored - phone only, local network, cloud.
If the data is stored in the cloud, it could still be secure and private provided that the copy of the data that is in the cloud is strongly encrypted before leaving the phone.
With a blackbox app though you get no assurance about any of this.
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The fact that it contains multiple Facebook trackers is all I need to know. 
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I was not speaking about the app, but about the ring hardware itself.
A good start. Try suggesting to them to provide a web app or something more accessible, along with other criteria you deem to be important.
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