There is drama brewing in the world of Pebble, the back-from-the-dead smartwatch. To understand what’s going on now, we need start in the past.

Pebble was a Kickstarter hit way back in 2012. The smartwatch was a true glimpse of the future, but the company didn’t last. In December 2016, Fitbit bought Pebble for (reportedly) less than $40 million.

Fitbit kept the backend of Pebble running through June 2018, as reported by Lauren Goode at The Verge:

Fitbit said in a blog post today that it was extending support for Pebble smartwatches until June of this year, which is another way of saying that support for Pebble will come to its inevitable conclusion in June.

RIP Pebble, but for real this time. Pebble will soon become less of a smart timepiece and more of a relic of a time when Kickstarter projects were successful and scrappy startups could claim a slice of the smartwatch market.

Many of Pebble’s features will be sunset, including Pebble’s App Store, the Pebble forum, the Pebble cloud development tool, voice recognition features, and SMS and email replies.

There are some caveats to the Pebble wind-down. Pebble’s main mobile apps for iOS and Android will continue to work for now, though compatibility could be broken with future iOS and Android OS updates. Notifications — one of a smartwatch’s core functions — will still work as long as those apps work, a spokesperson for Fitbit confirmed.

Fitbit used the opportunity to offer “ample time to explore Fitbit products.” How kind!

A few years later, Fitbit itself was acquired by Google. It was Google that open-sourced the Pebble software, giving Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky a way back into the smartwatch market with updated versions of his old product with a new company named Core Devices.

(More on that in a moment.)

During those dark years, a group called Rebble worked to keep the Pebble platform alive. They kept the Pebble App Store, web services, and more mostly up and running, building replacements when needed, all while encouraging developers to work on apps for the platform.

As a big believer in software preservation, I’ve been rooting for Rebble as they’ve labored to keep aging smartwatches useful. (It reminds me of the community focused on the Newton, in many ways.)

When Google open-sourced PebbleOS, Rebble saw it as a huge opportunity, as Will Murphy wrote on January 27, 2025:

Previously, we have been working on our own replacement firmware: RebbleOS. As you can see by the commit history though, progress was slow. Building a production-ready realtime OS for the Pebble is no small feat, and although we were confident we’d get there given enough time, it was never our ideal path. Thanks to the hard work of many people both within Google and not, we finally have our hands on the original source code for PebbleOS.

This does not mean we instantly have the ability to start developing updates for PebbleOS though, we first will need to spend some concentrated time getting it to build. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about Rebble itself.

The very same day, Migicovsky announced that he was launching a new range of smartwatches:

I started working on Pebble in 2008 to create the product of my dreams. Smartwatches didn’t exist, so I set out to build one. I’m extraordinarily happy I was able to help bring Pebble to life, alongside the core team and community. The company behind it failedbut millions of Pebbles in the world kept going, many of them still to this day.

I wear my Pebble every day. It’s been great (and I’m astounded it’s lasted 10 years!), but the time has come for new hardware.

You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since 2012. I’ve tried every single smart watch out there, but none do it for me.

He went on:

PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Reproducing that for new hardware would take a long time. 

Instead, we took a more direct route – I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble’s IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes! Over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this. And today is the day – the source code for PebbleOS is now available at github.com/google/pebble (see their blog post).

Thank you, Google and Rebble!
I can’t stress how thankful I am to Rebble and Google, in general and to a few Googlers specifically, for putting in tremendous effort over the last year to make this happen. You’ve helped keep the dream alive by making it possible for anyone to use, fork and improve PebbleOS. The Rebble team has also done a ton of work over the years to continue supporting Pebble software, appstore and community. Thank you!

I was happy to see Rebble get a shoutout in this post, and all seemed well in Pebble/Rebble/Core Devices. In early October, a post on the Rebble blog announced that the group had parnerted with Core Devices:

The awesome developer community that continue to build apps and watchfacesfor 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!

In short, Rebble would work on the backend services, while Core Devices would work on the front end of things like a new app store, and of course, manufacture and sell new watches.

That agreement seems to have sailed into rough waters. On November 17, another blog post showed up on the Rebble site. This one was titled “Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our Work,” which is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty spicy. There’s a lot in this post, but the complaints come down to a few central issues.

They say Core Devices hasn’t merged changes from their fork of PebbleOS back into the original repository, meaning Rebble can’t access those updates.

Rebble also claims that the Core Devices app is based on its work, and have taken their open-source project and closed parts of it off. Similarly, Rebble claims that it has changed its stance on Rebble hosting a developer site for the OS.

The biggest issue is the app store. The current Pebble app store is “100% collected by, maintained by, hosted by, and served by Rebble,” as the previous agreement had outlined, but that too seems to have changed:

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.

In short, Rebble feels that Core Devices is benefitting from the work the group has done over the past several years, and is now trying to push Rebble out.

There are, of course, two sides to this. Migicovsky responded to this with his own blog post the next day:

Core Devices and Rebble negotiated an agreement where Core would pay $0.20/user/month to support Rebble services. But the agreement broke down after over the following disagreement. 

Rebble believes that they ‘100%’ own the data of the Pebble Appstore. They’re attempting to create a walled garden around 13,000 apps and faces that individual Pebble developers created and uploaded to the Pebble Appstore between 2012 and 2016. Rebble later scraped this data in 2017. 

I disagree. I’m working hard to keep the Pebble ecosystem open source. I believe the contents of the Pebble Appstore should be freely available and not controlled by one organization. 

Rebble posted a blog post yesterday with a bunch of false accusations, and in this post I speak to each of them.

I’ll let you read his first response, but the part about Migicovsky scraping the Rebble app store jumped out at me:

Here’s what happened. I wanted to highlight some of my favourite watchfaces on the Pebble Appstore. Last Monday Nov 10, after I put my kids to sleep and between long calls with factories in Asia, I started building a webapp to help me quickly go through Pebble Appstore and decide which were my top picks.

Let me be crystal clear – my little webapp did not download apps or ‘scrape’ anything from Rebble. The webapp displayed the name of each watchface and screenshots and let me click on my favs. I used it to manually look through 6000 watchfaces with my own eyes. I still have 7,000 to go. Post your server logs, they will match up identically to the app I (well…Claude) wrote (source code here).

I integrated these picks into the Pebble Appstore on Saturday and posted about it on Sunday.

Don’t miss it: Migicovsky vibe coded an app to loop through the Rebble app store, and then claimed on Bluesky that he “manually went through 6000 Pebble watchfaces” to pick his favorites.

That’s mostly beside the point, but woof.

I don’t know where the truth is when it comes to the drama between Rebble and Core Devices, but in hindsight, this was probably inevitable. Rebble rightfully feels like it deserves credit and compensation for keeping the Pebble ecosystem alive. They worked for years to keep their beloved smartwatches going, and had no way of knowing that Google would open source PebbleOS, and that Migicovsky would eventually be able to ship new watches.

At the same time, Core Devices’ existence will mean that Rebble’s work will be enjoyed by more people than ever. There was always an unknown end date for Rebble when the last Pebble smartwatch died. Now, that date has been pushed out much further into the future.

Rebble deserves to be rewarded for its work, and its community deserves to be praised for their software preservation efforts. Likewise, Core Devices being able to ship new Pebbles in 2025 is a testament to Migicovsky’s unwillingness to let the platform slowly die out.

I truly hope Rebble and Core Devices can work things out. The world is a better place with the Pebble in it, and I’m sure both parties can see that this sort of fighting only jeopardizes its future.