Edinburgh tech company launches repairable sports watch
An Edinburgh-based, venture-backed, wearable-technology company is taking on tech giants Apple and Garmin with a repairable sports watch, allowing wearers to modify, programme and develop their watch, and build apps for it.
UNA Watch has launched what is thought to be the world’s first modular and repairable GPS sports watch, offering an alternative to the sealed hardware, closed software and regular replacement cycles that dominate consumer technology.
Backed by Techstart Ventures and SFC Capital, UNA has moved from crowdfunding into full commercial launch after attracting more than 1,200 early supporters and delivering watches to customers in 32 countries.
UNA is assembled using precision-engineered replaceable, modular components rather than being permanently sealed shut. Owners can replace parts including its battery and display, with spares available directly from the company.
UNA began by releasing elements of its hardware design under a creative commons licence, enabling owners and third parties to understand and adapt the product and develop compatible accessories.
Amid demand from users to programme the watch themselves, the company created an open software platform and released a software-development kit that has helped turn the device into a growing community ecosystem.
Independent developers are now producing sport and activity-specific applications faster than UNA’s internal team, creating tools for mapping, yoga, OS grid references, alternative sleep tracking and parkrun, as well as a compass. One developer has even produced a version of the classic mobile-phone game, Snake.
Founder Lewis Allison believes the community gives UNA a way to compete with technology companies whose teams, resources and development budgets it could never match.
He said: “Apple and Garmin have enormous teams and resources, so trying to beat them by copying their closed model would make no sense. We have taken the opposite approach by giving people the tools to repair, adapt and programme the product they own.
“We started with open hardware, but users wanted to go further and create software themselves. That has snowballed into a thriving community whose developers are now producing applications faster than our internal team.
“The technology giants decide which features receive attention, how their devices can be repaired and when customers need to buy another one. UNA gives its community a meaningful role in deciding what the watch becomes.”
Lewis, an electronics engineer who spent more than a decade developing wearable technology for the golf industry, created UNA to challenge a consumer-electronics model in which manufacturers continue to control how products are repaired, upgraded and used long after customers have bought them.
He said: “Your watch should belong to you – that should not be a radical idea, yet people can spend hundreds of pounds on a device and still have remarkably little control over it.
“The hardware is often sealed, the software is restricted and the battery can be difficult or impossible to replace. If one relatively inexpensive component fails, the accepted answer is frequently to discard the entire product and buy another.
“UNA was created to take on that model and show consumers it does not have to be that way. Ownership should mean being able to understand a product, repair it and, where possible, make it do things its original designers never anticipated.”
The watch uses USB-C instead of a proprietary charging cable and offers a claimed battery life of seven to 10 days, depending on GPS use, or approximately 20 hours of continuous GPS tracking.
UNA accepts that designing a repairable watch costs more and could reduce future replacement sales. However, Lewis believes enabling customers to keep products for longer will create greater trust, loyalty and lasting commercial value.
He said: “It costs slightly more to build, and we may sell somebody a replacement battery instead of an entirely new watch, but it is the right thing to do.
“Repairability cannot be added at the end. It has to be designed into the product from the beginning. We want UNA Watches to become familiar objects that people keep, rather than disposable accessories waiting for the next annual upgrade.”
The emergence of AI could now extend UNA’s open-development model beyond experienced programmers. People can increasingly describe the function they want and use AI coding assistants to understand UNA’s development tools, generate code, diagnose errors and refine an application.
Lewis added: “In the past, providing a software-development kit gave professional developers more freedom. In the age of AI, it has the potential to give almost everyone more freedom.
“The starting point no longer has to be ‘I know how to programme.’ Instead, it can be ‘I wish my watch could do this.’”
“Existing GPS watches are limited by the imagination and priorities of their internal development teams. UNA can draw upon the imagination of everyone who uses it. The best application for the watch may never come from us, and we would see that as a success.”
Lewis believes the combination of venture backing, repairable hardware, open software and community development gives UNA a credible route to competing with companies many times its size.
He explained: “Building a wearable brand involves much more than producing a physical device. It requires manufacturing, software, support and, most importantly, a community that cares about what the product becomes.
“It is a privilege to have cutting-edge technology strapped to your wrist, and Big Tech companies exploit the desire for new features by making replacement the default and restricting how existing devices can be repaired or adapted.
“The largest technology companies have spent years building walls around their products. We are interested in what happens when you put a door in one.”
UNA Watch is available in the UK, US, Canada and across the EU, as well as in Norway and Switzerland. It is priced at £179 in the UK and $199 in the US.
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