We get a version of this email roughly twice a month: I found my old Basis Peak in a drawer, can I still use it? The answer is no, and it is no in more ways than people expect. The battery is the part most readers already know about. The rest of the device is bricked by infrastructure decisions Intel made nearly a decade ago.
The battery is the first problem and it is not a small one
Intel’s voluntary recall began in June 2016 after reports of the watch overheating and blistering skin; the formal CPSC notice (recall number 16-235) was issued on August 4, 2016 and covered every Peak ever sold in the US and Canada, around 200,000 units. Health Canada published the parallel notice on the same day. There was no “good batch.” Intel did not isolate the failure to a single supplier or a single firmware build. They recalled the entire production run.
That recall is now nearly a decade old. The youngest Peak battery in existence was manufactured in late 2015 and has been sitting at whatever charge state it was abandoned at, in a sealed metal case, ever since. Lithium polymer cells that age badly tend to swell and short internally. The original 2016 failure mode was thermal runaway during charging, which is exactly the operating condition you would put it into to try to use it again.
If the battery were the only problem, you could imagine a hobbyist swapping in a fresh cell. People do that with iPods. The Peak’s case is glued, the cell is welded to the board, and even if you did the surgery successfully you’d still hit the second problem.
The companion apps are gone from the stores
Intel pulled the Basis Peak app from the iOS App Store and Google Play in the run-up to the December 31, 2016 shutdown. Both listings were taken down before the end of that calendar year. If you had the app installed on an iPhone running iOS 10, it kept working until the next OS upgrade broke its dependencies. On Android a few installs limped on into 2017 before the server side caught up with them.
Today, a fresh phone cannot install the Basis app from either store. The listings are not “discontinued but visible” — they are removed. You can find APKs of the last Android build on archival forums (XDA and the old Basis subreddit hosted them in 2017). The installer runs and the app launches. It cannot get past the login screen, which brings us to the third problem.
The cloud is gone, and the watch was a cloud product
This is the layer most people miss. The Basis Peak was sold as a wrist device, but functionally it was a sensor that uploaded raw signal to mybasis.com and pulled processed results back down. The heart rate graphs, the sleep stages, the “habit” recommendations, the weekly summaries: none of that was computed on the watch. The watch had enough firmware to drive its sensors, store a rolling buffer, and push to the phone over Bluetooth. The phone forwarded to Intel’s servers. The servers did the work.
Intel announced the shutdown in a support post on October 27, 2016 and executed it on December 31, 2016. The mybasis.com authentication endpoint, the sync API, and the web dashboard all went dark on that date. Nothing came back. We covered this pattern more broadly in our piece on cloud-dependent wearables; the Peak is the canonical example.
In practice, even with a working Peak, a working charger, and a sideloaded APK on a rooted Android phone, you cannot complete a login. The OAuth-style handshake the app uses to authenticate goes to an endpoint that does not exist. There is no fallback to local-only mode, because the app was never built with one. The watch can hold a few days of sensor data, but it has nowhere to send it.
What the watch can still do on its own
This is the smallest section and the only one with any good news. A Peak with a charged battery (which, again, you should not put on it) will function as a basic watch. The OLED lights up on a wrist raise. It shows the time, the date, and a step counter that resets at midnight local time. There is a heart-rate reading you can trigger manually by tapping through the menus, displayed as a single instantaneous number with no history.
That is the entire feature set without the cloud. Everything else the Peak was sold for — continuous heart-rate graphs, sleep architecture, habit nudges, weekly emails — depended on server-side processing. None of it is reachable. The watch becomes a $199 step counter, roughly the same as a $15 Casio with an accelerometer strapped to it, except the Casio’s battery is not on a recall list. We get into why the architecture made this outcome almost inevitable in why the Basis Peak failed.
The firmware is signed, so no, you cannot reflash it
Every few months someone emails us with the same idea: open the watch, find the debug pins, flash custom firmware, route the sensor data to a self-hosted server. It is a good idea. It does not work.
The Peak’s firmware is cryptographically signed. The bootloader will not accept an unsigned image, and the signing key never leaked. Intel did not publish a developer mode, and the production case has no exposed JTAG header or serial console; the test points are inside the sealed assembly and accessing them destroys the case. A few people on XDA and the old r/basisscience subreddit looked at this in 2017, posted teardown photos, and concluded the same thing: there is no community reflash path for a normal user.
Could a well-funded reverse-engineering effort break the signing scheme on a 2015-era ARM Cortex-M part? Probably, given enough time. Has anyone published one for the Basis Peak? No. The install base was too small and the device was discontinued before the modding community got interested. Compare this to the Pebble, which had a developer SDK from day one and is still being kept alive by Rebble nine years after the shutdown. The Peak had no equivalent community to inherit it.
What people have tried, and why none of it ended well
A short list of approaches that show up in our inbox and on archival forums. None of them produce a usable device.
Sideloaded APKs. The last Android build of the Basis app installs cleanly on Android 7 and later. It cannot complete login because the auth server is gone. The app will open to a cached state if it was previously signed in, but no new data can sync.
Fake DNS to redirect API calls. A couple of clever readers have pointed Pi-hole at mybasis.com and routed it to their own server. This gets you a TLS handshake error, because the Basis app pins certificates to Intel-issued certs. Even past the pin, you would need to reimplement the full API, which was never publicly documented. Nobody has done that work.
Reading the flash directly. The Peak’s internal flash can in theory be read out with a chip-off attack. We are aware of one teardown thread that attempted this on a dead unit and got partial results, but the on-device buffer only holds a few days of raw samples. The processed history was never on the device. Your sleep stages from 2015 are not in that flash; they were on Intel’s servers, and the servers were wiped.
Buying a “new old stock” Peak. Don’t. The battery is still a recalled battery whether the unit was opened or not. Amazon and eBay flag the recalled SKUs, but a few slip through. Anyone selling one in 2026 is selling you an e-waste item with a fire hazard.
The export window closed in 2016
This is the part that hurts the most for the readers who write in. Intel did the right thing, at least mechanically, when they wound down the service: they offered a CSV export through the mybasis.com dashboard from roughly August 2016 through the December 31 shutdown date. The export included daily summaries of heart rate, sleep, activity, and the habit metrics.
If you used that window, you have your data. If you didn’t, it is gone. Intel did not retain a backup for users who missed the deadline, and there was no extension. We have had three readers contact us between 2022 and 2025 asking whether anything could be recovered, and the answer has been the same each time: no. The servers were decommissioned and the storage was wiped under Intel’s standard retention policy.
This is why we are insistent in our reviews about data portability on modern wearables. The Peak is the cautionary tale every wearable buyer should know about, and it is not a hypothetical — there are real people whose 2014-2016 sleep records simply do not exist anymore because of an export deadline they didn’t know was coming.
What to do with the one you have
Recycle it. The right move, in order:
- Do not plug it in. The recall hazard is the charging cycle.
- Put it in a metal container — an Altoids tin, a small lockbox, anything non-flammable — until you can drop it off.
- Take it to an e-waste program that handles lithium-ion. Best Buy in the US accepts old wearables at the customer service desk at no charge. Call2Recycle has drop-off locations at most Home Depot and Lowe’s stores. Municipal hazardous-waste days will take it.
- Do not throw it in household recycling. The cell can puncture in a compactor and start a fire — this happens at recycling facilities often enough that they have dedicated procedures for it.
If you want to replace what the Peak was doing for you — continuous heart rate, multi-day battery, sleep without a chest strap — the closest 2026 options are in our alternatives guide. The Peak’s parent archive page at /basis-peak has the full backstory if you came here cold and want the rest of the history.
The Peak was a real product made by real engineers who built something ahead of its time. It is also, in 2026, a small electronic paperweight with a fire risk. Both of those things are true. Recycle yours.