A Scottish company is challenging industry giants with a fully repairable, upgradeable GPS sports watch that prioritises user ownership and community-driven development, potentially transforming the future of wearable tech.
An Edinburgh start-up is trying to redraw the economics of sports watches with a device designed to be repaired, upgraded and modified rather than replaced. UNA Watch, founded by electronics engineer Lewis Allison, has moved from crowdfunding to full commercial release with a modular GPS sports watch that it says gives owners far more control over hardware and software than the sealed products sold by larger rivals.
The company positions the watch as an answer to the familiar consumer-electronics cycle of disposable batteries, locked-down systems and short upgrade paths. Its case, battery, display and other internal elements are built as separate modules, allowing users to swap parts at home with standard tools. UNA also says it has published elements of its hardware design under a Creative Commons licence and provided software tools for developers, encouraging third parties to build compatible accessories and applications.
That openness appears to be one of the company’s main differentiators. According to UNA, independent developers are already producing specialist apps for mapping, yoga, sleep tracking, parkrun and compass functions, in some cases faster than the company’s own team. One contributor has even built a version of Snake. Allison argues that this community-led model gives the product a better chance of competing with Apple and Garmin than a conventional closed platform ever could, because the company can tap wider technical imagination without matching the headcount or budgets of the industry giants.
The watch itself is aimed at active users rather than fashion buyers. UNA says it offers dual-frequency GPS, always-on heart-rate monitoring and a battery life of up to 10 days, or around 20 hours of continuous GPS use depending on settings. It uses USB-C charging rather than a proprietary cable, and the company says parts such as the battery and display can be replaced at home. UNA’s own product information also describes the device as durable and available with free shipping to the UK, the US and the EU.
Pricing has shifted since the company’s crowdfunding phase. The Scotsman reported a UK price of £179 and a US price of $199, while UNA’s current product page lists the watch at £249.99. Even at the higher figure, the company is still targeting a segment well below premium multisport devices from Garmin or Apple’s higher-end wearables, while also making a pitch based on repairability and software freedom rather than brand prestige.
Allison, who spent more than a decade developing wearables for the golf industry, presents that as both a technical and commercial strategy. He has acknowledged that building a repairable product costs more upfront and may reduce repeat sales of complete devices, but he argues that longer product life can build stronger trust and loyalty. The company’s broader wager is that users will value ownership in a deeper sense: the ability to understand what they own, fix what breaks and adapt it to needs the original maker may never have anticipated.
The rise of AI coding tools may strengthen that argument. Allison has suggested that people who do not consider themselves programmers can increasingly use AI assistants to interpret documentation, generate code and refine apps for the watch. In that scenario, UNA’s open approach becomes less about serving a small developer audience and more about opening the product to any user with an idea for a feature. For a young Scottish company facing two of the best-known names in wearables, that community effect may be its most credible route to scale.
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