YaNaviPeb

English | Русский

Turn-by-turn navigation from Yandex Maps on a Pebble Time 2 watch.

While Yandex Maps is guiding you along a route, the watch shows the maneuver arrow, the distance to it, the maneuver text ("Поверните направо", "Turn right"), the arrival time, the remaining distance and the remaining time. The watchapp opens by itself when navigation starts and closes after it ends.

The project is not affiliated with Yandex or Core Devices and does not use their APIs: the data comes from the navigation notification that Yandex Maps shows on the phone. Text is shown exactly as Yandex Maps provides it, so it is in Russian.

How it works

The project has two parts:

• Android app (android/) reads the Yandex Maps notification with a NotificationListenerService, extracts the distance, maneuver, arrival time, remaining distance and time, and the maneuver icon, and sends only the changed fields to the watch, at most once per second. The fields are read from the notification's custom layout: the app inflates its RemoteViews and finds the fields by their view resource names (titleView, remainingDistanceView, timeOfArrivalView, primaryIconTinted and so on). If the distance or the maneuver view is missing, the notification's standard title and text are used instead.
• Watchapp (watchapp/, C, Pebble SDK) receives the data over AppMessage and draws the screen.

Communication goes through the official Pebble phone app (coredevices.coreapp) and the PebbleKit 2 library (io.rebble.pebblekit2). The arrow is not matched against a table: the icon itself is taken from the notification and sent to the watch (64×64, 1 bit), so every maneuver that Yandex Maps shows is supported.

Requirements

• A Pebble watch. Tested on Pebble Time 2 (emery); the watchapp also builds with an adaptive layout for every other Pebble SDK platform (aplite, basalt, chalk, diorite, flint, gabbro), but only emery has been verified on real hardware.
• Android 11 or newer with the Pebble app (coredevices.coreapp).
• Yandex Maps (ru.yandex.yandexmaps), or Yandex Navigator (ru.yandex.yandexnavi) with its "Фоновая навигация" (background navigation) setting enabled — without it, Navigator's notification has no maneuver data.
• A language pack with Cyrillic on the watch, e.g. "Кириллица (для уведомлений)" from the Pebble app.

Installation

Download app-release.apk (Android app) and watchapp.pbw (watchapp) from the latest release, or build them from source.

1. Install app-release.apk on the phone. The app reads notifications and is installed outside Google Play, so the system may block it; see Troubleshooting.
2. Install watchapp.pbw on the watch: open the file on the phone with the Pebble app.
3. Follow the phone setup below.

Phone setup

1. Open YaNaviPeb and tap "Open notification access settings". Grant access. If the switch is greyed out, see Troubleshooting.
2. Disable battery optimization for YaNaviPeb and for the Pebble app, otherwise the system may stop them in the background.
3. Test the connection without driving: "Start watch demo" plays a recorded route on the watch. Do not run the demo during real navigation.

After that, just start a route in Yandex Maps.

Troubleshooting

• Play Protect blocks the install ("App blocked to protect your device"). Google Play Protect blocks apps installed outside Google Play that can ask for sensitive access, such as notification access. Install from a computer with adb install -r app-release.apk, or temporarily turn off "Scan apps with Play Protect" (Play Store → profile icon → Play Protect → settings) and turn it back on afterwards.
• The notification access switch is greyed out ("Restricted setting"). Android restricts sensitive permissions of apps installed outside Google Play. Open Settings → Apps → YaNaviPeb → the ⋮ menu → "Allow restricted settings", then grant notification access again.

Menu names vary between Android versions and vendors.

Building from source

Android app

Requires the Android SDK and JDK 21.

cd android
./gradlew :app:installDebug

installDebug installs the app on a phone connected over adb. Alternatively, build the APK with ./gradlew :app:assembleDebug and install app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk manually.

Watchapp

Requires Pebble SDK 4.33.1 (the pebble tool) and Python 3.

cd watchapp
pebble build
tools/patch_appinfo.py

tools/patch_appinfo.py is required after every build. It adds the companionApp block to build/watchapp.pbw, which SDK 4.33.1 silently drops from package.json. Without that block the Pebble app does not allow the Android app to send data to the watch.

Install build/watchapp.pbw on the watch: open the file on the phone with the Pebble app, or run pebble install --phone <phone IP> with Developer Connection enabled.

Limitations

• Street names and traffic lights are not shown: the Yandex Maps notification does not contain them.
• The Yandex Maps notification format is undocumented and may change with a Maps update. If the watch stops receiving data, check this first.
• Only one phone–watch pair is supported.

Development

android/                  Android app (Kotlin, View Binding)
  app/src/main/.../nav/     Yandex Maps notification → NavState
  app/src/main/.../watch/   watch protocol and sync
  app/src/main/.../demo/    recorded route for the demo mode
watchapp/                 watchapp (C, Pebble SDK)
  tools/                    appinfo patch, sample messages for the emulator

Android unit tests:

cd android
./gradlew :app:testDebugUnitTest

The watchapp can be tried in the emulator with a sample maneuver (right, left, straight or idle; requires Python 3 with Pillow):

cd watchapp
pebble install --emulator emery
tools/send_sample.sh right

The emulator has no language pack, so Cyrillic text shows up as boxes there.

Protocol

AppMessage keys are declared in watchapp/package.json (pebble.messageKeys) and numbered from 10000 in array order. The same numbers live in Protocol.kt on the Kotlin side; ProtocolTest checks that they match.

Key	ID	Type	Max bytes	Example
STATE	10000	uint8	1	0 — no navigation, 1 — navigating
DISTANCE	10001	string	32	150 м, or an arrival phrase like Почти на месте
MANEUVER	10002	string	48	Поверните направо
REMAINING	10003	string	15	1,61 км
ETA	10004	string	7	23:57
DURATION	10005	string	19	1 ч 17 мин
ICON	10006	bytes	512	64×64, 1 bit per pixel

String limits are UTF-8 bytes without the terminating NUL; the phone truncates strings on a character boundary. Icon layout: rows of 8 bytes, most significant bit first, 1 is a white pixel.

License

0BSD: use, modify and distribute the code however you like, no attribution required.