Hello,
I’ve just bought my first Mi Band 3 and I don’t quite understand why I should install other apps. I activated “use smartwatch” and "monitor heart rate under Settings. The sleep graph looks as usual with spikes and troughs, but the bar graph doesn’t work. What is it that MiTools or Notify & Fitness do that Sleep as Android can’t do?
Check this:
Mi Band has no public API, which means that we cannot connect to it and get the sensor data.
It communicates with phone via Bluetooth, so in theory it is possible to crack the protocol to send and receive commands from the wearable.
This is a very time consuming task that is hard to do correctly, so we don’t do it ourselves.
This is what apps like Miband Tools and Notify and Fitness do.
Sleep as Android has an API to which those apps connect. So the apps effectively work as a bridge between Sleep and the device.