UNA Watch announces commercial launch of its repairable wearable

UNA Watch has moved from crowdfunding to a full commercial launch, and it’s selling the pitch that consumer tech has been missing: build the thing so people can open it, fix it and change it. The startup says its sports watch is the world’s first modular GPS sports watch, with replaceable parts instead of sealed hardware.

That modularity is the whole point. Owners can swap components such as the battery and display, and UNA sells spares directly. Some of the hardware design has also been published under a Creative Commons licence, so users and third-party makers can study it, adapt it and build accessories around it. The company says more than 1,200 early supporters have already backed the idea, and watches have now been shipped to customers in 32 countries.

UNA is backed by Techstart Ventures and SFC Capital, and founder Lewis Allison is making no secret of the target. He spent more than a decade developing wearables for the golf industry before starting this company, and he says copying Apple and Garmin would have been pointless. Instead, UNA is betting that repairability should be part of the product from day one, even if that makes manufacturing more expensive and reduces future replacement sales.

The software side follows the same logic. Demand from users who wanted to programme the watch led UNA to create an open software platform and release a software development kit. Independent developers are already building sport and activity apps faster than UNA’s own team, with tools for mapping, yoga, OS grid references, sleep tracking, parkrun and even a version of Snake.

That community approach may be the sharpest part of the strategy. UNA says AI-assisted coding could lower the bar further, letting users describe what they want in plain English and use AI tools to generate code, fix errors and refine apps. The watch itself uses USB-C, claims seven to ten days of battery life or around 20 hours of continuous GPS tracking, and is on sale in the UK, US, Canada, the EU, Norway and Switzerland for £179 in the UK and $199 in the US.