Rebble

Meet Your New Board of Directors

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:42:42 +0000

The first ever Rebble Board Election has concluded, the previous board have ratified the results, and now we’re excited to share the outcome! Along with some familiar folks, we have a fresh face, with JP replacing Joshua while David, Will, Stasia, and Ruby retain their seats. Joshua will continue as the Foundation’s Treasurer, which we all greatly appreciate.

The new board has already met twice in order to select a President (David) and Secretary (Will) and discuss aspirations and plans for the upcoming term, as well as to share documents, policies, and practices with the newer members. We’re meeting again in April to further flesh out our nascent goals, including organizing our third hackathon and figuring out how Rebble best fits into the Pebble 2.0 world. As always, we welcome your input via the forums, Discord, or email. Let’s all work together to make this the best year yet! <3

Vote for your next Board of Directors!

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Rebblers,

This is just a short blog post to say: voting is now open for the Rebble Foundation’s next Board of Directors! As I mentioned in our last blog post, the Rebble Foundation is the non-profit organization that keeps Rebble running, and the Board of Directors is a group of five people, elected by Rebblers like you; the Board steers how Rebble uses its resources and sets goals for Rebble over the next year. The vote is a ranked choice ballot – you can vote for as many candidates as you like, and your vote is of course anonymous.

On a personal note, this election makes me really excited about the future of Rebble. I’m taking (at least) a year off from serving on the Board, but seeing that we have 12 amazing candidates who want to serve Rebble makes me really hopeful – and I’m particularly excited to see a variety of different opinions and focuses on what Rebble should do next. The hardest part about this election for me is that I had to come up with an order to rank so many good candidates in!

Anyway, this is your opportunity to shape what Rebble becomes next, and I really would like to encourage that you take it! Voting is open to all Rebble users with accounts older than February 16th, 2026; voting is open through the end of the day March 9th. And as a special incentive, if you vote in the election, and then send me an e-mail with your mailing address, there is a very good chance that I will mail you a special “I voted” sticker…

So, please participate in the Rebble Board election! The future of Rebble is bright – and it’s yours to make.

All the best,
joshua

Nominate yourself for the Board of Directors!

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, there! For those of you who have been following the Rebble Dev Forum, you might have noticed that we’re gearing up for elections for the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors! I’m writing this blog post to tell you that self-nominations for the Board are now open for the next two weeks, and that you (yes, you, dear reader!) should run for a seat on the Board!

As many of you know, the Rebble Foundation is the non-profit organization that keeps Rebble running. The general idea of a non-profit is that, instead of shareholders, investors, or owners, we have bylaws and a Board of Directors that governs how we do our work. Since we don’t have shareholders, the Board is responsible solely to Rebble’s mission, rather than trying to make money for anyone in particular. In order for that to happen effectively, we depend on everyday members of the Rebble community to step up and guide that work!

So if you’re interested in that kind of thing, well, this is the post that has more information for you – read on.

What’s the election process?

I’m glad you asked! This year, all five seats on the Board are up for election (though the election rules guarantee that at least two members of the previous Board will carry over, so that we preserve some continuity). For more details on exactly how it works, you can read all the nitty-gritty details, but in short, here are the key timeframes:

Starting today, Monday, February 16th, 2026: Board nominations are open! Prospective members have two weeks to nominate themselves by submitting the self-nomination form.
Sunday, March 1st, 2026, end of day anywhere-on-Earth: Nominations close.
Monday, March 2nd, 2026: Voting begins! Every eligible Rebble user (that is to say, a Rebble user that created their account before the cutoff) can submit a ballot, ranking Board candidates in order. (More info on that soon!)
Monday, March 9th, 2026, end of day anywhere-on-Earth: Voting ends. Votes are tallied by an instant-runoff vote, according to the election rules.
Thursday, March 12th, 2026: The current Board meets to ratify the election results. Results are announced immediately afterwards, and the new Board’s term is effective immediately!

What does a Board member do?

OK, here’s where I get to a little bit of opinion rather than unshakeable truth. But in my mind, there’s three major tasks for a Board member, with roughly equal importance.

Keep the lights on. There are day to day, boring, administrative tasks involved in running a non-profit. The services that we currently run have to keep running. There are external entities that we have to interface with. We have to pay our taxes and our cloud bills. Elections have to run. There are not a lot of these things, but they exist! They don’t just happen on their own; people on the Board makes them happen, and will have to divide up this work.
Dream big things. The whole point of what we are doing with Rebble is to believe that things can be better than they are. We have to dream big! If we had all the time and money that we wanted to spend on this kind of thing, what could we do? What’s the best possible option for all things Pebble? In my mind, you can’t pick the best thing to reasonably do without dreaming of what could be better – and some of the best ideas that have been had in this space (say, a Pebble itself! or RWS!) seemed impossible to begin with. The Board is the guiding force for where Rebble goes, and has the responsibility for seeing not just today but far into the future.
Do realistic things. On the other hand, even when we dream big, it’s still inevitably true that we’re constrained by what we have in front of us. The Board’s responsibility is also to make Rebble the best we can, right here – and that means to pick some projects that the Board can reasonably accomplish in its term, commit to them, and make them happen. Members of the Board don’t have to be the experts who do the work themselves – a great example of that is our recent work on microPebble on iOS, where we amplified our capabilities by paying an external firm! But the Board’s job is to take little baby steps all the time, and make things happen.

Of course, this is just my opinion. What the actual job of the next Board is, is entirely up to the next Board to decide! And, as a result, the amount of time commitment that should be expected on the Board also would vary. But my suspicion is that the things that I have listed above are a few hours of work a week – say, 2 to 5 hours, depending on what’s going on – and less than that may not be serving the constituent body of Rebblers adequately.

One thing that I want to note is that previous Board have set guidance for future Boards, but it’s not set in stone. If you agree with the above, I of course encourage you to run. But even if you disagree with the above, or you disagree with choices that the Board has made in the past, I still encourage you to run! Non-profits run better when they are lead by people who care about them – and, inherently, people who care bring a variety of ideas to the table, and not all of them agree with each other. In my mind, it’s more important that a future Board member cares about the importance of Rebble as an entity than that they agree with me on everything!

How do I run?

Ah, now we’re on to the fun part. To be a candidate for the Rebble Foundation Board election, you need to submit a self-nomination form by the end of the day, Sunday, March 1st. On the self-nomination form, you’ll be asked to fill in a few things:

How should we name you? Tell people what name you’d prefer for people to call you by, and what your online presences are; list any relevant usernames, etc., that Rebblers might know you by.
Who are you, and what are some of the main contributions you’ve made to the Rebble community? In 500 words or fewer, give us a quick introduction to yourself! How have you been connected to the Pebbleverse in the past? What do people know you for, and what skills will you bring to the Board?
If you are elected, what do you intend to do in your capacity as a Foundation board member? In 500 words or fewer, tell us how you’d use your term on the Board! Why should Rebblers vote for you? What’s your dream for what Rebble should become? What do you think the Board ought reasonably get done in a year, and how do you plan to make it happen?
Do you have any potential conflicts of interest with your responsibilities as a Foundation board member? It’s not in the slightest bit disqualifying if you do, but Rebblers should know what other obligations you might have – and how you plan to manage them.

These nomination items will appear publicly next to your name on the ballot for Rebblers to decide on their next Board.

To get your creative juices flowing, I’ll give you an example of what I’d write about myself if I were running for this term. (I’m not, since I’ve got an enormous amount of stuff going on in my personal life over the next few months and should probably sit this term out! But fear not, I’ll still be around the Pebbleverse, and I’ll hope to run for a future Board when I have time to give it my all.)

What’s your name? Joshua Wise; you might know me as joshua or @jwise0 on Discord, or @jwise on GitHub.

Who are you and what are your main contributions? I’ve been around since the very early days of Pebble, in the #pebble channel on Freenode (RIP)! I helped set up the early Rebble Web Services infrastructure, and I’ve been maintaining it for the last 5 or 6 years. I built a bunch of the admin console for Rebble Web Services. In years past, I worked with ginge on the early RebbleOS efforts, and a test board I designed in 2019 was the first non-Pebble hardware to successfully run a PebbleOS watchface; once PebbleOS became open source, I also wrote the first prototype of PebbleOS on Core 2 Duo for Core Devices. Recently, I’ve been mostly doing administrative work for the Foundation as the Treasurer.

What do you intend to do as a Board member? My biggest goal for a 2026 Board term is to continue down the path of having a sustainable, independent Pebble ecosystem. Concretely, there are two things I would focus my energy and the Foundation’s resources on: getting microPebble into a state where it can be a daily driver, bringing PebbleOS back to life on legacy devices (snowy, etc), and continuing to support the community’s work on beautiful visual design for Pebble apps. (I have dreams about having new independent Pebble hardware, too! But I imagine that those aren’t a near-term project.)

Do you have any conflicts of interest? My day job is as half of Accelerated Tech, Inc., which has previously done contract work both for Rebble and for Core Devices. Accelerated Tech is not currently engaged with either of those clients. I would recuse myself from any vote involving Accelerated Tech.

Of course, you don’t have to agree with all of my plans! And although I’ve been around the Pebbleverse approximately forever, there is no expectation that a Board member need have been around as long as I have (indeed, I would welcome seeing some fresh faces on the Board!). But the thing that really matters is that you have to nominate yourself before the deadline.

I’m really looking forward to seeing people running for Board positions. It’s been such a joy to see the Rebble developer community take shape again over the past few years. From the bottom of my heart, thanks to all of the people who have been here to make it happen!

Yours,
joshua

A peek into the future: microPebble on iOS

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:30:00 +0000

In my previous blog post about Rebble’s finances this year, I alluded to the idea of Rebble commissioning a port of Matej Drobnič (matejdro)’s microPebble to iOS. I promised I’d write more about that soon – and luckily for you, soon is now! The most important piece of information is, of course, “yes! we’re doing it!”, but I have a fair bit more to say about it, including: why we think microPebble is important; what we’re doing to make microPebble possible on other platforms; and where we want to go with microPebble in the future. I think it’s very exciting, and I hope you will too!

What is microPebble, and why is it important?

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, microPebble is an alternative, open source, Pebble companion app that Matej Drobnič started work on back in September. In Matej’s words, it’s a “small scrappy app […] with the functional UI and features [he] cares about.” microPebble is built on Core’s libpebble3, which in turn, is built on the libpebblecommon that we sponsored the development of many years ago.

Matej started this work before Core Devices open sourced their CoreApp; even though CoreApp is now open source, though, we don’t think that microPebble is irrelevant! CoreApp has a focus on all of Core Devices’s products, not just their PebbleOS family of watches, and it exists to support their ecosystem (and it should!). We think that the Pebble world also deserves to have a vendor-neutral app for all sorts of PebbleOS devices past, present, and future.

We think that the Pebble world should have an app that supports many different players in the Pebble ecosystem with many different goals. For instance, obviously, we shouldn’t expect Core Devices to have to support other manufacturers’ watches in their app! But the Pebble world should definitely have an app that allows other people to make their own watches, after all.

And, of course, we’d love to have an app with first-party-quality support for Rebble Web Services. We’d like to continue to add features, without having to depend on anyone else to implement them – for instance, we recently rebuilt support for shared pins in the Timeline, and, of course, we’d like to continue to extend how Bobby (Rebble’s voice assistant) can be useful.

There are many other things that we’d love to have in an app of our own – things that don’t need to be in scope for CoreApp. We’d like to be able to publish to F-Droid, for instance – and it could be exciting to try to use microPebble’s Kotlin MP base to try to build a Pebble desktop app.

More than anything, we’d like for microPebble to be the start of a community-owned platform that’s designed to last far into the future – and we’ve been thinking about how to make that happen.

Joining forces with Intent

Back in September, the Rebble Board reached out to the team at Intent. We saw the work that was happening on microPebble, but for the time being, Matej only had development access to Android – and since it was his own personal project, of course it made sense that he’d prioritize devices that he had! We explained why we thought it was important to have our own mobile app, and we asked the Intent team to evaluate the state of microPebble, and how it could help us meet our goal.

The Intent team helped us flesh out what we were looking for – we were hoping to come up with a spiritual successor to the original Rebble mobile app, Cobble. They came up with a few avenues to explore:

What would it take to modernize the old Cobble Flutter framework to use libpebble3?
What would the level of effort be to bring up microPebble on iOS?
And, once CoreApp became open source, would it be better to use CoreApp, microPebble, or Cobble as a base?

We decided to work together for a few weeks to have them do some research, and come up with some conclusions on each of these paths. They looked at each of the options, and found that microPebble was most likely to meet our requirements – and then, to our surprise, in the remaining time, the Intent team did not just estimate the effort, but even better than that, they brought microPebble to life on iOS by rewriting the UI with Compose MP!

This was obviously very exciting. I solidly had a big smile on my face when I paired a watch to my daily driver iPhone using microPebble!

What’s next to do?

Of course, this is still just the beginning, and there is a lot of work to do before microPebble-on-iOS becomes the Cobble dream. We’re still working on coming up with a roadmap for what we’d like to prioritize in terms of next features! We expect that we’ll be posting some in the Rebble itself! category on the Rebble Dev Forum. For now, here are a handful of things that we’re thinking about, in the short term and in the long term:

Obviously, we should get this merged back into Matej’s microPebble base. We have a development branch right now as a proof of concept, but we should structure it so that we can put up some PRs!
Also, there are a few changes to libpebble3 itself that are needed. We need to upstream these changes.
The obvious next thing to do is to make sure that iOS is at feature parity with Android. A few screens are missing, and such; we’ll have to improve that (and, while we’re at it, probably come up with a feature matrix in the README for what works on Android, what works on iOS, and what works on both!).
If we’re going to sponsor development on microPebble, we’d like to get it to the point of using it as a daily driver in a RWS world – and, for me, that means being able to use Bobby! So we’ll have to itemize what’s missing to get us there – and then start ticking off the list. (Even in the time since I started writing this post, fishy, on Discord, has been doing a lot of work recently on getting app store support up and running on microPebble-for-Android!)
And, finally, once microPebble reaches a baseline level of functionality, we’d like to start skinning the UI using some of the Cobble Figma designs (I still love that art style!).

We’d like to continue to work with the Intent team, and from the Rebble side, we’ll continue to fund work on microPebble (by Intent, and by others who are capable!). My thought was that the Intent team can be active participants in the community, as peers to other developers – and that they can use their experience in building modern mobile applications to set us up for success by building scaffolding that the community can develop on top of. For instance, we’d like to have Intent start to build out a visual component library and prepare some best-practice examples for how to implement some of the Cobble UI designs – and then other people in the community who might have less experience (maybe even hardware engineers like me??) can continue to implement more screens on top of the framework that they’ll build for us.

There’s a lot to do, and it’ll be fun to see how it shakes out! But it is very exciting to see the initial progress, and one of the fun parts about this project is that we can do all of the planning and coordination work in the open. I’m looking forward to seeing it come to life!

You can start playing with it today

Originally, I had planned to wait to write this blog post until we got the initial proof of concept merged back into Matej’s upstream. I still need to spend some time sifting through diffs! But the more I became busy with other tasks, the more I realized that you all deserved to see it sooner :-)

So, if you want, you can start playing with microPebble-on-iOS today, and you can build it yourself! The Intent team provided us with a proof-of-concept repo, with iOS build instructions in the README – to get started, just take a look at github/pebble-dev/micropebble-ios-poc. Clone it with submodules, follow the build instructions, and you, too can have your iPhone talking to your watch!

And one of the cool things about doing all our work in the open is that we can show you how the sausage is made. The Intent team put together a great summary report on the work they did for us, and if you’re curious, I’ve uploaded it here so you can read it.

Obviously this is very early stages, and I can’t imagine this is going to remain in this repository in the long term; we’d like to unify it back with the microPebble repository, and probably these changes will get rebased as individual PRs on top of microPebble (and we have work to do, given that there’s been work recently on the non-Compose UI for microPebble!). So don’t count on that particular repo being terribly long-lived.

As always, we’d love to hear your input on what we should do next. Feel free to post about it in the Rebble forum, or come chat with us on Discord!

Rebble Foundation Finances 2025 #Wrapped!

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:10:00 +0000

Hi everyone! It’s me, Joshua, your friendly Treasurer for the Rebble Foundation. We promised earlier this year that we were going to find ways to be more transparent with how Rebble is run – so I wanted to provide an update on our finances for this year, so you can see what we’re spending money on, where it’s going, and how we’re doing!

Anyway, I just finished the QuickBooks review for December, and I am happy to say that our financial situation is decently strong. So first off, here’s a table of our cash flow for this calendar year. (There are some notes below.) Our fiscal year closes in June, so this isn’t a formal ‘annual report’. But given this is coming in December, it obviously is a #Wrapped!

Foundation Financial Overview

Rebble Foundation Financial Report
Starting Cash on Hand		$508,407
Income		+$87,457
	Subscription revenue	$82,054
	Interest income	$5,403
Program Expenditures		-$37,320
	Initial port of NimBLE to PebbleOS (Hexxeh)	$18,000
	MicroPebble iOS initial work (Intent sp. z o.o.)	$11,000
	NimBLE debug assistance for Snowy (Codecoup sp. z o.o.)	$7,000
	pebble.nix Apple Silicon hardware subsidy (Ruby)	$820
	Hackathon #002	$500
Administrative Expenses		-$30,138
	Legal fees for Foundation startup (Bodman PLC)	$14,068
	Federal tax	$11,955
	Accountant fees (Curcuru & Associates CPA)	$2,800
	Software: G Suite; 1Password; QuickBooks Online; Acodei; Zendesk; Figma	$1,315
Cost of Goods Sold		-$22,452
	The Weather Company	$8,652
	GCP	$6,585
	Honeycomb	$6,435
	Algolia	$420
	AWS	$360
Ending Cash on Hand		$509,315
	2025 Profit / Loss	+$908

Notes

These data were collected from January 1, 2025, to December 25, 2025. Our fiscal year actually ends in June but I really wanted to get a report out for the end of the year, and most people don’t think in fiscal years anyway, so there you have it.
Figures are not fully final (various service fees / bank fees / etc. are not included in this report).
Heck yes you read that right! MicroPebble iOS initial work! More on that in a blog post soon.
The ending cash on hand does not quite add up because there are outstanding liabilities to GCP / Honeycomb / etc that were accounted above. However, the cash on hand was taken directly from our bank account numbers, and does represent our real position.
Rebble Foundation is a non-profit in the State of Michigan, but it is not an IRS-registered tax-exempt non-profit under code 501(c). What this means is that we do not pay tax to the State of Michigan, but we do pay United States Federal tax. Our non-profit structure ensures that no individual people have an ownership share in Rebble, and that governance happens in accordance with the by-laws, rather than in the interests of maximizing profits for shareholders.

Treasurer’s Report

Hey, these numbers are not too bad! Here are some of my interpretations of the above.

One of the big concerns that I’ve had for a long time is that we have not been spending enough to benefit the community – as you can see by our $500,000 in cash on hand that we started and finished the year with. (We’ve been running Rebble for quite a while now!) To that end, I had hoped that we would not turn a profit this year, and we’d start spending that down. We didn’t quite achieve that, but I’m not too upset about where we landed: hitting break-even roughly within 1% on a ~$90,000 operating budget is pretty good.

Similarly, I am encouraged that we are starting to ramp our spending up on Pebble-related projects, rather than just web services. This year, we spent roughly an equal amount on contributors inside our community, and also on engaging external services to perform tasks that we haven’t been able to do on our own. I’d like to continue that trend into 2026 – we should be using our resources both to extend the reach of what we can do, and to reward people inside the Rebble community who are doing cool things that contribute to the Pebble movement!

We spent lot of money this year on administrative tasks – we incurred nearly $14,000 in legal expenses. This is not a surprise – setting up a legal entity is expensive and time-consuming! I expect that next year we will spend less money on those tasks, and we can use that additional funding to invest in our community.

I believe that our financial position is strong. For 2026, from the Treasurer’s perspective, I have the following recommendations for the rest of the Board:

We should continue to increase our investment in the community in 2026 by increasing our program expenditures. I recommend a target of at least $60,000 in program expenditures, with a target of splitting this approximately equally between recipients inside the community and external resources to augment our capabilities.
Our financial position is strong, and we can afford to dip into our savings if we can identify programs that provide good value for our community. It is acceptible to run a deficit in 2026.
Our highest goods-sold expense is weather data. We should consider finding ways to provide more value to subscribers using these data – for instance, adding APIs so that watchfaces and watchapps can use weather data that subscribers are already paying for, and finding ways to provide weather data on new Core watches.
At this time, we do not urgently need to seek out other revenue sources, but it may be useful to lay the groundwork for doing so, especially if we can increase our program spending. We should evaluate in the second half of the year if we are on track to meet our spending targets, and if so, we should consider giving our community options to fund our work other than subscriptions.
Traditionally, Rebble has had difficulty effectively spending on our programming because of our limited administrative bandwidth. We should consider finding a part-time paid executive director to help us achieve our goals in how we want to invest in the community.

On behalf of the Rebble board, we’re looking forward to continuing to serve you in the new year!

Happy Rebble Day: the Dev Forum is back!

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Today, December 9th, is Rebble Day – the 9th anniversary of the official birth of Rebble – and what better way to celebrate than by sharing the latest evolution of our developer community? I vividly remember the original Pebble forums, where I received help, became inspired, and even began friendships that still endure today. We’ve spent the past decade primarily organizing and socializing on Discord (hey, come join us!), but I have to say, there is something to be said for classic discussion forums. Sure, it was a simpler time back then, but that doesn’t mean that slower, linear, searchable discussions have to be a thing of the past: as the Pebble developer community keeps growing, we’ve been thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to get all of the knowledge that we’ve all assembled into one place that was designed to last? That’s why we’re excited to announce today the launch of the new Rebble dev forum – forum.rebble.io!

The forum is a place to learn from others, get help, discuss hardware old and new, show off your latest watchfaces and apps, collaborate on smartstraps (still my favourite!), and, most importantly, post pics of pets! The forums have only been live (with no promotion until now) for about a week, and already we have dozens of users sharing over a hundred posts across more than fifty topics.

One of the coolest features is our appstore integration – since the forum login is based on your Rebble/Rebble developer account, you can share your detailed appstore listing in the forums and get feedback, encouragement, organize beta testing, and more! In fact, each new or updated app automatically gets its own forum post:

and each appstore listing now contains a link back to its own forum thread so that your users can chat and cheer you on!

We’ve seen some really great interactions happening already, such as in irek’s Naïve watchface thread where they’ve been sharing updates, coordinating betas, receiving encouragement, and making fun connections.

I’ve been constantly impressed with how amazing our community has been on Discord, with some the smartest and kindest people that I’ve seen all in one place, teaching and learning and sharing. It’s been amazing to see dozens of developers already starting to share tips, solve problems, and collaborate on the new Rebble dev forum – why not take a moment to stop in and say hi? And of course, don’t forget to share what’s on your wrist!

Rebble in your own world

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:30:00 +0000

It’s been a bit of a rough ride in the Pebble world lately. Since our blogpost from last week, and Eric’s response to it (read both, if you haven’t yet - there’s a lot of important context in them!), we’ve heard a lot of feedback from the community about the situation we find ourselves in.

When we said we wanted your input in our last post, we meant it - we’ve been closely watching and participating in the conversations since. Thank you to everyone for giving your input, and for being kind to each other in the process! We’re genuinely blown away by how little we’ve had to step in and moderate heated discussions - couldn’t be prouder of this little community we’ve built together. <3

We’ll be honest - our last blogpost was more inflammatory than it needed to be. We’ve been at this for a while, trying to negotiate a deal with Core Devices while also trying to figure out what we want out of that deal at the same time. Clearly, a lot of the tensions we’ve been feeling in that process spilled out there, and it wasn’t as productive as we would have liked as a result.

If anything, it’s made one thing clear to us - we should have gotten the community’s input much earlier! In hindsight, a lot of the division could have been avoided with the level-headed insight you all have given us over the past few days. We’re sorry for letting it get to this point – no one benefits from a fight between Core and Rebble.

We’ve been so appreciative of all of the feedback that we’ve heard. Many of you have given us words of support, and offered your trust and kindness (thank you so much!) – and many of you have also given us hard (and, often, well-deserved!) criticism and suggestions for how we can improve. Today, we want to give you a few concrete steps we’re taking as a result of what you’ve told us, to make sure that we’re worthy of your trust long into the future. Here’s a summary of what we want to talk about:

We believe that the apps that you made belong to you. We didn’t make that clear enough, and we want to fix that, including by offering for download an archive of the Rebble App Store.
We have a better understanding of how Eric interacted with the App Store API, and we don’t think that he intended to “steal” from us there.
We’ve added two more members to the Board of Directors of the Rebble Foundation! And we’re improving the Foundation’s governance to be more transparent.
We’re ready to figure out what’s next.

Updated November 24th, 8pm Pacific: The app store archives are now available!

On the Rebble App Store

By far, one of the most common criticisms we heard from Core Devices and the community was:

Why does Rebble think they own everything on the Rebble App Store?

It’s a great question! We spent a while scratching our head about this, because, to be clear, we don’t believe this at all.

Of course we don’t own every single app and watchface published to the App Store - those are owned by the people who put in the effort to produce them in the first place! As maintainers of the App Store, our jobs are to get them to users that want them – and to keep them safe, so that effort doesn’t end up lost to time. We don’t want to claim ownership over everyone’s apps - that would be a huge disservice to our amazing community of app developers.

Our last blogpost didn’t do us any favours in this regard, though. The first version contained the following wording:

What you now know as the Pebble App Store from Eric’s new company, Core Devices, is the result of nearly a decade of our work. The data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% Rebble.

A lot of people told us that they interpreted this as “everything in the App Store is 100% owned by Rebble”. Honestly, we can’t really blame them for interpreting it like that (even if we feel it’s a little uncharitable). It was a rough choice of wording on our part, and we should have been a lot clearer from the outset – that shouldn’t have made it to our final copy.

We’ve since edited that section to make our intentions a lot clearer - the part of the App Store that’s 100% Rebble is the maintenance, operation and curation of the App Store itself, not the apps it hosts. We’re sorry we gave the impression that we owned all of your apps and watchfaces - that was never our intention, and we should have been a lot more careful about how we phrased it.

The App Store’s apps and watchfaces belong to the community, not to Rebble. We’ve always believed this, and we don’t intend to change our stance on that anytime soon. In the past, we thought that we could do the best for the community by avoiding fragmentation of the app store. Former Pebble engineer Lance R. Vick had an insightful comment thread on Hacker News that meaningfully changed our opinion: we still think that, as a community, we can build the best app store for the Pebbleverse, but we think he’s right that other people should get to try out their own “alternative visions” for the Pebble ecosystem.

So on that front, we’re publishing a complete archive of all apps and watchfaces on the Rebble App Store for everyone to download and use. You can download it right now on the dev portal (thanks to the modern world of AI scrapers wasting huge amounts of bandwidth, you’ll have to log in, but then click on the gear and click on the download link!). The archive will update each month with the latest export from our database. The archives are free for you to do whatever you want with them - share them around, keep your own backups, anything that you come up with! We only ask that if you do use our archives to make something, please leave a prominent note saying that you got it from us, and provide a link to the archives so people know where you got them from. You don’t have to, but we’d be sad if you didn’t. :(

On Stealing Allegations

One of the main accusations we made in our first post was about Eric scraping the App Store. It was so prominent that it’s even in the title of the post - “Core Devices keeps stealing our work”. At the time, we felt pretty justified in making that claim (we wouldn’t have made it otherwise, obviously). But now that we’ve had some time to cool off, and reflect on things with level heads… yeah, we’ve gotta be totally honest here. This accusation was definitely overheated.

A brief timeline of events from our perspective is in order, so we can explain how we got here. On the 11th of November, there was a very large spike of requests to the App Store for roughly 3,600 watchfaces. On the 14th November, after digging into the logs, we identified that the traffic came from an IP that had made other requests from Eric’s personal Rebble account.

At the time, negotiations around the App Store with Core had already significantly deteriorated, in some of the other ways we discussed in our post. Given that context, we could only assume that this activity was Eric testing a scraper for the App Store.

Snapshot of the App Store logs from November 11th

On the 16th of November, we learnt that Eric had built an application to help him curate a “Top Picks” section for Core Device’s App Store frontend. We had no source code for this yet, but in our concern for how things were going, we assumed that this was part of a larger tool that he had planned to use around these scraped data. After our discussions fell apart on Monday afternoon, our blogpost went out that evening, with the scraping accusations still included.

From the source code that Eric released, we now know that this was not scraping with the intent of supplanting the App Store, but instead with the intent of augmenting its capabilities. We may have been upset with his conduct in other parts of the negotiation process, but Eric’s interactions with our appstore API were surely not meant to be “stealing”, and we no longer consider them that way.

Once we understood this, we should have edited our previous blog post. And we should have done it much sooner, but here we are: we’ve since added some text at the top to reflect this reality, and we can (and wish to) apologize to Eric for taking so long.

[Rebble Foundation intensifies]

One of the common things that we heard – from the community, and from Eric – is that people don’t understand what the Rebble Foundation does, how the Foundation operates, and that we haven’t done a good enough job of being transparent enough to earn your trust. We heard of a few concrete things that would help, and we agree and obviously we should just do them! Here are a handful of things that we’re doing to improve the Foundation’s governance:

Board elections. Soon, some seats will turn over on the board! Until now, we’ve been co-opting on the Board (i.e., the existing Board agrees to put people on the Board). We’re going to set up a structure so that the community can have a more direct say in how the Foundation is run.
Meeting notes. We’ve been meeting informally by Discord. This is effective, but we actually need to set more formal plans! The Board is going to meet at least once a quarter in a form that enables us to set goals, and put them on record – and then share them with you all.
Budget transparency. A handful of folks asked how we were spending our money, and thought it sounded like we were holding our funds as a secret. We don’t intend to be that way, but “just posting on Discord here and there” is not a great way to communicate! The Board will report on our financial situation, and what we’re spending money on, and make that public.

Basically, we should have done all of these things a long time ago – this is how good non-profit governance should work. We got so distracted by all of the noise with setting up the Foundation, and with negotiating about our relationship with Core, that we’ve been making much slower progress on this kind of infrastructure than we would have liked! So watch this space – we anticipate having something to report by the end of January.

And, finally, amidst an otherwise dour blog post, we actually do have some good news to report. We’re excited to add two new members to the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors, bringing our total up to five Directors! We’re happy to welcome:

Ruby Iris Juric, who you may also know as srxl. She’s been maintaining developer.rebble.io for months now, and has been a real champion of making that experience better for users.
Stasia Michalska, who you may also know as LCP. They have been recently on an absolute tear of making improvements to the App Store backend, and adding Timeline topics support! Stasia also brings some desperately-needed governance experience from their work on openSUSE.

In addition to their recent contributions, both Ruby and Stasia have been long-time community members and are all-around Good People To Have in the Rebble community. We’re so glad that they’ll be contributing their skills to more directly shape the future of Rebble, and we hope that you will be too!

Settling Disputes

Fighting sucks. We don’t want to keep fighting with Core Devices - no one gets anything out of that. At the end of the day, we want to find a deal with Core that works for Rebble, for Core, and for the broader Pebble community. Concretely, we have no intentions of shutting off access to Rebble Web Services for Core’s watches, nor do we have any desire to. If we must do so at some point in the future, we commit to providing at least a month’s notice before making any changes.

But we do need a usage deal in place, so we can ensure the reliability of our services for Core Devices’ customers. Many people within the community have suggested bringing in a third-party mediator to help us figure out how to work together. We think that’s a great idea, and we’re ready to do that whenever Eric is.

One of the things that we’ve understood from both our blog post and Eric’s is that we have real common ground: what matters to both of us is keeping the Pebble ecosystem alive and kicking. And from the community reaction, what we hear is clear: we can only do that by working together. If you’re reading, Eric - we’re prepared to come back to the table whenever you are. Let’s both do our best to give your users the best possible Pebble experience.

Brighter Days Ahead

Ever since our inception, Rebble’s goal has always been to keep the Pebble community alive. Keeping Pebble alive means more than just Rebble Web Services, a mobile app, and developer tools - it means keeping the space as inclusive, accessible, and welcoming as possible. We have let a lot of anger and division get in the way of a healthy Pebble community. For that, we’re really, truly sorry. We want to get things back on track, and get back to what we all do best - keeping our favourite smartwatches ticking away.

To everyone who has stuck with us up to this point: thank you so, so much. The feedback you’ve given us has been immensely useful for figuring out what our next steps should be. You’ve all been overwhelmingly civil and productive (even when we haven’t!) and we can’t wait to get back to making our Pebbles better than they’ve ever been before with you all. We’ve all got brighter days to look forward to - let’s keep making awesome happen, together.

And as always, we’d love to hear any more feedback that you have. Please feel free to get in touch on Discord, or by e-mailing us, at board@rebble.foundation.

Yours in hope, the new Rebble Board of Directors, David, Joshua, Ruby, Stasia, and Will

Some Personal Thoughts On This Whole Mess

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:36:00 +0000

Hi all – Joshua here. I wanted to write down some personal thoughts about this whole mess. (If you missed it, we – Rebble – wrote a blog post Monday evening in which we had some relatively spicy things to say about how our collaboration with Eric and Core Devices was going; Eric also wrote a blog post responding to ours, of course.) I’m saying these mostly without my Rebble hat on – opinions in here are mine, and do not represent the Board (though I imagine others might share some of these thoughts).

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about, like, what actually happened here. It is clear to me that this is not just (or even at all?) about watches, or ownership of data, or web services. As far as I can tell, we are closer than we are distant on most things, and there are a few sticking points. At the end of the day, they are just computers, and everybody oughta go touch grass on that front… myself included. I’m not going to talk about technical or contractual things at all in this post.

So if it’s not that, what is this about? There is something more fundamental at play here, and I guess it feels like a question of basic respect.

Just so you are prepared, here’s the arc of what I’m about to lay out: first, I am going to be kind of critical, because, after all, I have my own feelings of anger about this, and I’d better blow off some steam before I can make nice! Then, I am going to look at some of the things that have made me feel more positively about this whole thing. And finally, I am going to moderately think about what we can learn from those, and how that informs what going forward looks like. Strap in, dear reader.

In which I am critical

OK, so first off: I don’t really want to respond point-by-point to Eric’s blog post, but I am going to say one thing about this. I am the Board member that he referred to a few times in his post. The screenshots of Signal conversations are with me; I was not asked about those, and had I been asked, I would have preferred that those screenshots not be shown.

But what I said there is real, and I think it’s important. I have had real conversations with Eric about a lot of things, not just as a coworker, but as a friend; you can see in those conversations that I vent about problems that were going to affect both of us.

This is how people relate when they trust each other; you can see that comfort clearly in what we had to say to each other. Most of what I said there was in my personal capacity, not in my capacity as Rebble. Personally, I felt pretty disrespected and hurt to see those conversations show up in public.

Even before Eric responded, I was reading some of the comments on Reddit, especially from some of the people who worked on Rebble over the past years, and this is what crystalized for me. I read Katharine’s comment, and I remembered when she left how some of those interactions had gone. I remembered at the time how she felt like her contributions were on the verge of being erased by neglect. I read what Lavender had to say, and the way she described feeling like we were being “muscled out”.

And then I read what Ruby had to say, which you should read if you haven’t yet. (My cards on the table: I find it heartbreaking.) She has put an enormous amount of effort into this. She said that she felt betrayed and strung along, but the word that stuck out to me is that she felt disrespected.

It crystalized that this wasn’t about watches at all. More than anything, it seems like the people behind Rebble wanted respect as partners, and a little bit of an opportunity to have a say in what they’d done. It felt like, since the very beginning, we were striving for clarity of how we fit into this – and any time it felt like we got a slice of the pie, it was a slice of a pie that disappeared before we got to the table.

And it crystalized why I was angry. I wasn’t angry about watches, either. I was angry because, as far as I could tell, some YC founder guy was messing with my friends and trying to push them around. I don’t really care about watches and watchfaces (though I can’t wait to tell you about the titanium Pebble 2 cases that Astosia and I have been working on… I’ve been wearing one for a few months and holy shit does it look fly). I care that my friends are respected, and that my friends have a little agency in a world that’s trying to steal a little bit more of it from us every single day.

In which I am grateful

This is, also, the really cool thing about Pebble. This is, actually, exactly what Eric built, back when this whole thing started.

These watches are our little expression of how we get agency in the world. Google and Apple and Meta have people whose entire jobs are to optimize metrics to get you to look at your screen more. The whole point of Pebble, from day 1, was that it got out of your way. The screen was on and you didn’t have to wait for it, it was waiting for you. Notifications meant that you did not have to pull your phone out of your pocket anymore – you could look down, see whether it was important, and then go back to doing whatever you were doing in the outside world. Pebble gave us agency. (Pebble gave me agency over a brain that would readily get lost in a phone any time I picked it up.)

Pebble started off with a developer platform. Apple thought that you should only get what they gave you on an iPhone; Pebble let you build beautiful things, constrained only by what the hardware could do. If you wanted to modify your world by knowing what the score of your favorite game was at a glance, Pebble would let you. If you wanted to have a live connection to your kid’s blood glucose monitor available at a glance all the time, there was a Pebble app to make that happen – you didn’t need Apple’s permission.

The community that came out of this, frankly, is incredible. The Pebble community is one of the kindest spaces I have ever been part of. There have been a lot of differences of opinion in the last few days. (Good! There should be!) The moderators have gently guided people to be kind to each other when things get touchy, and almost universally, people involved take it to heart.

But beyond that, one of the coolest things about the Pebble community is that the folks there take agency over their life in the bravest possible ways. I have seen more queer young people come through the Pebble community space than almost any other space I’ve been around. I like to imagine it is because these are the people who are learning to express themselves. The freedom and agency of the Pebble and Rebble world is just another form of that.

These are the people I have an enormous amount of respect for. The people behind Pebble who made that possible, I have a lot of respect for. These are people who cared – and care – about the world they were building. Eric is one of those people.

In which I think about the past

There has been a breakdown in this respect and trust somehow. It has been simmering, and then only now did it explode. I think we all did it a disservice by not addressing this head-on.

I’m by no means innocent here. I posted on Reddit with some of my complaints above about my DMs being dumped. /u/captionreader posted to ask, “[okay, you do not feel great at having those conversations posted, but] why is the tone of the Rebble post so inflammatory?”. Yeah, hey, that’s a good question! What the hell?

In part, I don’t think we really knew how to write something else. The Rebble team’s anger at being disrespected like this shined through, and after we saw what our logs and data could only show as scraping, we hit back hard. (I don’t think we were totally wrong to do so, given how everything had gone up until then, but right or wrong, it’s what we did.) But certainly going on the offensive like that was not exactly the most respectful way we could have handled this with Eric, either.

And the world has become so polarized, and we are lost in a microcosm of it. Absolutely everyone is at absolutely everyone else’s throat. There is an intense schism between two teams that I am vaguely adjacent to at work. It is very unpleasant to watch. And for God’s sake, while we were drafting the previous post, my country’s government had gotten so busy getting angry at each other about which order they were going to vote on a pair of bills in¹, that they had forgotten to give food to people who are hungry!

We were so busy arguing about who was going to serve which bytes that we each forgot to respect the humans that were going to make it happen. That includes me: I will unhesitatingly take responsibility for my part of pinning the sins of the entire VC-backed world onto Core, and onto Eric.

In which I think about the future

Here is the thing about this whole thing that I did not expect. I had sort of expected comments on Reddit to be really truly polarized. Once Eric’s post came out, I felt sort of ill not because of what it would mean for Rebble and/or Pebble, but because it seemed like people were going to be up in arms one way or the other. It’s not what I wanted.

And then something kind of magical happened. Even Hacker News managed to do what we couldn’t, and come up with what seemed like a middle ground. The conclusion specified seemed to be “both positions seem at least superficially understandable, hope you figure it out” (or, less charitably, “everyone involved seems like an asshole. good luck, suckas”). I wasn’t sure what to make of it because it didn’t fall into the black or white reality that I had set myself up for, but it seems like the roadmap of an answer.

It doesn’t make me any happier about things that got us here. But if there is a way forward, it is that we are in this together. We are going to have to figure out where we are each coming from, and spend a little extra effort doing what our politicians forgot how to: respecting each other. And then, I think it’ll be easy to figure out what we’re going to do about watches.

This is overly reductive but I am exaggerating to make a point. I have more nuanced opinions about it than this. Don’t @ me. ↩

Core Devices Keeps Taking Advantage Of Our Work

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 07:30:00 +0000

Edit (November 26th, 2am Pacific): This post was originally titled “Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our Work”. We’ve had a bit of time to reflect on this blog post, and we no longer agree with the characterization of Core Devices’ actions described around automated access to our App Store as “stealing”. We’re keeping the original text as-is to avoid confusion, but we’ve gone into more detail about why we’ve changed our stance on that in our follow-up blog post here.

This is a post that we don’t take any joy in writing. When we wrote last month about our agreement with Core Devices, we went into it believing that cooperation between Core and Rebble would be the best decision for the Pebble community. Core would spearhead the development of brand new watches, and we’d be there to provide our Rebble Web Services to go with them.

Unfortunately, our agreement is already breaking down. We hoped that by putting on a kind face, and publishing an optimistic-sounding blog post along with Eric, that we’d be able to collaborate in a way that met our responsibilities to you, our users. We knew that neither of us would be able to get all we wanted, but we thought we had enough common ground that we could serve Pebble users together.

Rebble has been working since the beginning to keep the Pebble experience alive – maintaining the App Store, building new services like Bobby, and running frontline support for people keeping their Pebbles ticking the whole time. (The Pebble App Store that Core offers right now is backed by Rebble!) But Eric and Core recently demanded that, instead of working together, we need to just give them all of our work from the last decade so that they could do whatever they want with it. And in Eric’s latest newsletter, he hasn’t told you the truth about where the work that makes his business run came from. We’d rather have cooperated with them to build something great together, but we’ve reached an impasse. So now, we’re asking you – our community – what to do with Core.

Update (November 18th, 7pm Pacific): Eric responded to this blog post. Obviously we don’t entirely agree with his position, and we don’t agree with how he has characterized our position – if we did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation! – but you should definitely read it too.

Edit (November 19th, 5pm Pacific): We added the words ‘collected by, maintained by, hosted by, and served by’ around ‘100%’ below to more accurately reflect our original intent.

How we got here

Nine years ago, Eric Migicovsky’s company, Pebble Technology Corporation, went out of business and dropped support for the hundreds of thousands of Pebble smartwatches out there. Rebble – and our community! – put together a Herculean effort to salvage the data that was left on the Pebble app store.

Since then, we built a replacement app store API that was compatible with the old app store front end. We built a storage backend for it, and then we spent enormous effort to import the data that we salvaged. We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around. So far, we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data. And the humans who run the Rebble servers have also spent incredibly late nights upgrading Kubernetes clusters, responding to outages, and generally keeping things ticking.

What you now know as the Pebble App Store from Eric’s new company, Core Devices, is the result of nearly a decade of our work. The data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% collected by, maintained by, hosted by, and served by Rebble. And the App Store that we’ve built together is much more than it was when Pebble stopped existing. We’ve patched hundreds of apps with Timeline and weather endpoint updates. We’ve curated removal requests from people who wanted to unpublish their apps. And it has new versions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we’ve run!

We’ve been negotiating with Eric for months now. We’ll compromise on almost everything else, but our one red line is this:

Whatever we agree on, there has to be a future for Rebble in there.

We want to give Core’s users access to the Rebble App Store. (We thought we agreed on that last month.) We’re happy to commit to maintaining the Web Services. We’d be happy to let them contribute and build new features. And what we want in return is simple: if we give Core access to our data, we want to make sure they’re not just going to build a walled garden app store around our hard work.

The problem is, Core won’t commit to this. Core wants unrestricted access to do whatever they want with the data that we archived and have spent the last years curating, maintaining servers for, and keeping relevant. If we gave Core the rights to use the App Store data however they want, they could build their own Core-private App Store, replace Rebble, and keep any new changes proprietary – leaving the community with nothing.

We’ve asked Eric about this every time we talk. He has occasionally said verbally that that isn’t their plan… but when it comes time to put it in writing, he has repeatedly refused to guarantee that. A week ago, we asked him to chat about this one more time – he delayed our conversation, and then in the intervening time, scraped our app store, in violation of the agreement that we reached with him previously.

What’s in an agreement?

We’re sad that the Rebble community has had tension with Core Devices ever since Google released the original PebbleOS source code. We’ve been pretty quiet about it for a while – we thought that we had a chance of working together if we tried hard not to fracture the community. But by now, a verbal promise isn’t enough.

When the code was released in January, we immediately branched the repository and started maintaining PebbleOS. The Rebble community began porting an open-source Bluetooth stack to PebbleOS, to support classic Pebble devices. Eric mentions this in his blog post, but what he doesn’t say is that Rebble paid for the work that he took as a base for his commercial watches!

Shortly after, Core forked PebbleOS¹ away from public maintainership. Back in June, they said that they would merge back periodically²; it’s now November, and we’re yet to see anything get merged back. Multiple efforts to contribute to PebbleOS were put on hold³ while we waited for Core to merge upstream. It never happened. Eric, in his blog post, now says that he will run PebbleOS as a “benevolent dictatorship”.

Rebble’s work is the backbone of Core in other ways. The Core Devices app is based on libpebble3; in Eric’s blog post, he said that Core built it. The reality is that it started life as libpebblecommon, which Rebblers wrote as part of our mobile app project (Cobble), and we funded through the Rebble Grants program. The work that we did together saved Core a month or two of engineering effort at the beginning; Core took Rebble’s work, added to it, and then paid us back by putting a more restrictive license on their contributions and wrapping a closed-source UI around it.

A few months ago, Core promised that they would let Rebble maintain and own the developer site, after Rebblers spent days making it build again, importing new content, etc. Then, in Eric’s original proposed agreement, he demanded not only that Core publish the developer site on their domain, but that we remove our copy of the developer site and redirect to theirs.

These have been blows to our community, to be sure. We’ve tried not to let this affect our negotiations: we want to work together. But we went into this wary, knowing what a promise from Core meant.

The last straw was two weeks ago. We’d already agreed to give Core a license to our database to build a recommendation engine on. Then, Eric said that he instead demanded that we give them all of the data that we’ve curated, unrestricted, for him to do whatever he’d like with. We asked to have a conversation last week; he said that was busy and could meet the following week. Instead, the same day, our logs show that he went and scraped our servers.

What’s at stake?

Rebble’s goal is to have a community-driven place to develop for these watches that we all love – today, and also in the future, if (love forbid!) something were to happen to Core Devices.

If we gave Eric an unrestricted license to our data, he could do the same thing he did to our firmware work, and our mobile app work. He’d have the right to take it and build his own app store – and the work that we’ve done together as a community for the past decade would no longer be in our control.

We watched this happen ten years ago when Pebble went under (Rebble has been around longer than Pebble and Core combined by now!). We don’t know that Core can commit to supporting this ecosystem in the long term. After all, the warranty on Pebble 2 Duo is 30 days long, and early users are already reporting that their buttons are falling apart!

But even if Eric has the best intentions now and can find the funds to keep Core afloat, you could imagine that OpenAI, or someone else, would want to acquire Core and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. We’ve watched this play out so many times, from so many other companies, in the decade since – a product we love gets released, and then gets killed off, another victim of closed-source enshittification for profit. We love these watches, and we’d be sad if that happened. And more to the point, we love this community that we’ve been a hub for.

This is your choice

In our last post, we said that Rebble belongs to you. We mean it. These are the apps that you’ve written and contributed to your fellow Pebblers. These are the watches that you spent so long caring about and loving. This is your community, where you make awesome happen. So we see two directions from here, and we need the community’s help to decide.

If y’all would like, one option is that we could aggressively protect the work we’ve done, and try to protect the community going forward. If Eric had the foresight to back up this data nine years ago and maintain it himself, there’s nothing we could say about this. But he didn’t, and we, together, did. We made it absolutely clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of the Rebble Web Services.

This gets ugly in a hurry, but we have legal resources that can protect us. We’d rather spend our time on building a next-generation open source mobile app than spend it on a fight, but if it’s what we have to do, we’re not afraid. If we want to keep what we built, we’re going to have to use our energy to protect it.
The other option is that we could just let Eric do whatever he wants. Eric believes that our database should be free for anyone to make their own copy of, because we are a non-profit Foundation. We don’t agree, but maybe you do! Nothing has to live forever, and we’ve done great work together. If the community prefers that we pass the mantle onwards, we’ll do what y’all think is right.

These are both painful options for us. And to be clear, we’d rather do neither! If Eric and Core are willing to give us a legal commitment that they’re not just going to kick us out, and that they’ll work with us, we’d much rather do that. We’re happy to let them build whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt Rebble. Eric, you’re the best in the world at making quirky hardware for people who genuinely love what they wear. We’re great at building a community. Use our locker, use our timeline, use our App Store – we’ve built it just for you. Just as long as we can work together as partners.

But in the mean time, we’re here at a crossroads.

We need you

For our friends who have supported us over the past years: we’re sorry that you’re caught in the middle of this. We think Rebble can be the hub of community, and Core can make awesome products, and these don’t have to be in conflict. Eric’s new devices, Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2, look absolutely amazing! We want to support him in making beautiful hardware long into the future – without exposing our users to the classic walled garden enshittification trap.

But we want your input. If Eric and Core can’t play nice, we need you, our community, to tell us what to do. We’re serious: if you think we should do something different, we will. So we’re posting this on Reddit /r/pebble and a handful of other places. We’ll be (gulp!) reading the comments – the top rated and the long tail – to try to understand what the community’s sentiment is. We’ll be watching the discussion on Discord. And, of course, if you want, you can e-mail the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors directly. We’d like to hear from you.

Yours in hope – so many of us from the Rebble team over the past 9 years, including: David, Joshua, Will, Ruby, Stasia (LCP), Siân (astosia), Harrison (Link Sky), Lavender, Ben, Ephraim (gibbiemonster), Jakob (Jackie)

May 20, 2025: “FYI, we’ll be moving firmware development to https://github.com/coredevices/pebbleos for now as we need to move faster than what the current repository permits (e.g. merge without reviews). This means we assume a certain technical debt, as there’ll be things that may need cleanup before bringing them back upstream. However, Core is de-facto the only contributor at this point, so it’s more efficient to develop in a fork and sync later. Note that the same rules will still apply (apache-2.0, keep old device builds, etc.), so things do not get out of control quickly.”” ↩
June 23, 2025: “FYI, what we’ll do for now, once https://github.com/pebble-dev/pebble-firmware/pull/251 is merged (thanks @hexxeh), is to rebase our fork against it. Then, from time to time, post other merge back PRs, like e.g. Obelix initial support. If there’s anything that needs to be fixed on those PRs, we’re of course open to doing it (we assumed a tech debt when forking). Over time, upstream will become the main source of truth as our fork will contain fewer patches, and it will actually be more efficient to use upstream directly because there’ll also be other potential contributions we benefit from.” ↩
June 22, 2025: re: PR #58: “I thought previously the stance was not to accept any PRs that were functionality changes yet anyway? Only stuff to fix existing devices or bring up new ones.”; “I defer that to @ericmigi , I do not merge these kind of changes w/o him approving. Last one I merged was really a UI bugfix”. See also, March 4, 2025: “From Core’s perspective, we’re not planning to touch the UI at least until we get PebbleOS working on a real watch. So we won’t be merging any UI changes until later.”. Other discussions in PRs. ↩

Rebbles in a World with Core

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 07:30:00 +0000

Almost nine years ago, when what was to become Rebble began to emerge from the ashes of Pebble Technology, Corp., David stated a goal for the project to “bring the many disparate (Pebble preservation) efforts under a single banner, concentrating energy and enthusiasm to maximize the likelihood of continuance and resurgence of Pebble as a platform.” It’s hard to believe it’s been that long – and it’s hard to believe that it’s already been 8 months since Google released the original firmware source code, and Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky formed a new company, Core Devices … it seems that the “resurgence” that we imagined has truly come to fruition!

It’s a really lovely moment to take a breath and take a look at how far we’ve come. We’re incredibly proud to have delivered on the promise of “continuance” for these nine years – for longer than Pebble Technology Corporation itself, in fact! – and to have evolved along the way from a loose collection of co-conspirators, to Rebble Alliance, LLC, to our current non-profit Rebble Foundation. It has been a delight and an honor to get to serve you – the Pebble community – for all these years, and to have made good on our promise to keep the dream alive for our favorite little watches.

And it’s also exciting moment to look forward to how Rebble and Core Devices can partner together in a future for the Pebble ecosystem, and to come up with some new promises for you going forward! So for more on how we’re working with Core Devices, how we plan to continue to serve you, and how you can get involved, read on…

Core 🧡 Rebble

The awesome developer community that continue to build apps and watchfaces for Pebbles today are what makes Pebble, Pebble. In a world where the legacy Pebble app (just about) hangs on, Core Devices are producing new watches running on their app – and in the mean time, other open source apps are being built by community members (hey, a little more on that in a moment!). Fragmentation is a possiblity that would result in a less than stellar experience for everyone – which is why we’re super excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Core Devices to use the Rebble app store back end on Core watches.

For now, Core Devices’s new appstore is a continuation of the legacy Pebble appstore, from the same lineage as Rebble’s – and Core Devices and Rebble have agreed to use Rebble Web Services as the singular backend. This means that any apps developers upload or update through the Rebble Developer Portal will appear in both appstores! How neat is that? We’ve also started on a long list of improvements to these services which will continue to be pushed out over the coming weeks – some will be minor bugfixes, others more exciting features.

Because Rebble doesn’t produce revenue from hardware sales like Core does, and we’re not requiring that Core users have a Rebble subscription, we’ve made it work by agreeing that Core will pay us a reasonable amount to cover our costs and to support the maintenance of Rebble Web Services. Our agreement with Core is non-exclusive; if anyone else wants to build PebbleOS hardware and use the Rebble app store, hit us up and we’d love to get you in on the app store, too!

So – if you are using the new Core Devices app, you do not need a Rebble Subscription to use the app store. If you wish to use Bobby (once support is added for the new Core Devices app), you will need to have an active subscription. And we hope you’ll continue to have one anyway – more on that in a moment.

Our promise to you

As Core and other vendors start to produce hardware for PebbleOS, we were worried that the ecosystem may begin to fragment. This is one of the reasons that we worked so hard to partner with Core on a unified app store. Access to legacy apps, apps developed since the shutdown and submitted via our dev portal, and new apps created through hackathons and other efforts should be guaranteed for all devices. And we haven’t forgotten why we’re all here – nine years ago, a company that built things that we love blinked out of existence, and a community, rather than a company, came together to keep supporting them.

So we’ve been working on distilling Rebble Foundation’s mission, and what our responsibility is going forward. So far, what we’ve come up with is something like this:

Rebble Foundation’s mission is to support, promote, and advocate for small, low-power, open-source, user-respecting smartwatches, and to foster a community around them. Rebble Foundation wants both to do this today, and to be able to do this long into the future, without depending on support from any particular external entity – Rebble Foundation’s primary responsibility is to the users and community that it supports.

We think that it’s OK if we work with partners to meet this goal, including device manufacturers like Core – and, for that matter, it’s OK if this is a little fluid, if it means that we branch into other user-respecting families of devices and technologies¹. But our responsibility to our users means that we have to be advocates for technologies that will outlast current manufacturers – and, for that matter, that could even outlast Rebble Foundation!

Our promise to you is that we’ll do our darned best to keep our eye on this goal, and to work towards it the best we know how. We owe our existence to you, the community, that cares so much about these watches, and that has trusted us to continue that work over the past nine years, and it’s our job to fight on your behalf to make sure that a community can continue to care about little friendly pieces of hardware long into the future.

Reinvesting in Rebble

Right back at the start, we never could have imagined the success that our subscription service would end up experiencing, and that income has been incredibly helpful in keeping the lights (and cloud/servers) on — when Katharine and David originally did the math, they expected that they would personally have to chip in a hundred bucks a month or so to help subsidize the few dozen subscribers we expected! A few hours after our soft launch of Rebble Web Services, we realized that we Rebble might be able to sustain itself after all. Over the past nine (!!) years, we’ve built up a small cushion of cash, and it seems like a good time to reinvest in Rebble going forward.

We’re excited to say that we’ve just this morning gotten a bid back from a group that we’re really excited to work with on getting our mobile app, Cobble across the finish line to something that’s a beautiful and functional app that you all will want to use on an every day basis – for PebbleOS devices past and future.

All of the work that we’ve done to continue the Pebble ecosystem has been open source because we believe that, together, we can build a Pebble future that we love – and it’s paid off in spades (for instance, Maxim’s Timeline support contribution was possible only because Rebble Web Services are open source!). We think that the Pebble community deserves a first-class open source mobile app that we can have ownership of, and that we can maintain long into the future – so we think it’s a no brainer to spend our resources to make that happen.

We’ve also recently been working on using our resources to get the open source PebbleOS release up and running on legacy Pebble Technology Corp watches. We engaged the services of Codecoup – the maintainers of NimBLE – to help us find a handful of bugs in our implementation of Bluetooth on legacy watches, and once we have a moment to breathe, we’re looking forward to getting back to work on that project!

Rebble needs you!

We have a lot of things we’re working on, but one thing we wanted to be clear on is: Rebble (still!) needs you!

Here are three ways you can help that would make a huge difference.

Contribute to Rebble! We have so many exciting projects going on! Are you excited about designing the future of the app store, or helping to make Cobble beautiful? Would you like to hone your back-end development skills in building paths to submit to the Rebble app store directly from the Pebble SDK? Do you have features that you want to add to Bobby? These are all things that would make a big difference, and it’s way easier to get started than you might think.

Run to be on the Board of Directors! Rebble is a large community of enthusiasts and contributors of all kinds, but the Rebble Foundation is run by a Board of Directors, right now consisting of Will, Joshua, and David. These seats are staggered to ensure continuity, and we have a seat opening up soon. Are you interested in helping guide the future of Rebble – or do you know someone who is? We’ll be holding elections soon, and we’re looking for nominees – please nominate yourself (or a friend!) by sending the Board an e-mail with your name, a sentence or two about why you’d like to be on the Board, and a sentence or two about how you think you could contribute. (Although it would be great to have someone with non-profit leadership experience join the Board, the only hard requirement is that you’re excited about serving the Rebble community!)

Continue your Rebble subscription! We have a lot of work that we want to do to continue to serve you. We don’t sell hardware, and all of our software is free and open source, so subscriptions and our app store whitelabel agreement are our only source of revenue. If you wiant to support the Rebble Foundation’s goal of ensuring the longevity of the Pebble ecosystem in an accessible and user-respecting manner, then please consider continuing your subscription.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

That’s about it for now, but you can expect to hear more soon, and more frequent blog posts as our activities accelerate. Thanks for joining us in these past nine years. It’s you that’s made it worth doing this. We look forward to being involved in the next exciting decade of little joyous smartwatch evolution with you!

Your Rebble Board of Directors –

David, Joshua, and Will

What do we mean by user-respecting? Roughly, we think that a technology is user-respecting if it puts the needs of the user, not the needs of the manufacturer or developer, first. By way of examples that are informative, but not by any means complete: user-respecting technology does not demand or optimize for a user’s engagement unless it genuinely helps that individual user; it does not create or remove features unless doing so directly helps a user, rather than helping a manufacturer. If a user-respecting technology processes a user’s data, it does so only in a way that helps that user, and it does not transmit a user’s data to any other party without a user’s consent. ↩