Pebble, Rebble, and a Path Forward
I believe the Pebble community, Core Devices, Rebble and I all want the same thing. We love our Pebbles and want them to keep working long into the future. We love the community that has sprung up around Pebble, and how it’s persevered - next year will be the 14th anniversary of the original Kickstarter campaign!
But I have to respond to claims made by Rebble posted on their blog yesterday. I will link to their post so you can read their side of the story, and I’ve asked them to link back to this blog post from theirs.
Look - I’m the first person to call myself out when I fail. I wrote a detailed blog post about Success and Failure at Pebble and often write in detail about learning from my mistakes. But in this specific case, you’ll find that I’ve done my utmost to respect the Pebble legacy and community. Rebble is misleading the community with false accusations.
For those just passing through, here’s the TLDR:
Core Devices is a small company I started in 2025 to relaunch Pebble and build new Pebble smartwatches. Rebble is a non-profit organization that has supported the Pebble community since 2017. Rebble has done a ton of great work over the years and deserves recognition and support for that.
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.
Sections
Short history#
- Dec 2016 - Pebble shut down. Some IP was sold to Fitbit. I blogged about why I think we failed. Fitbit continued to run the Pebble Appstore and web services for 1.5 years. I really appreciated that.
- Rebble organization grew out of the official Pebble Developers Discord.
- July 2018, Fitbit shut down the Pebble appstore.
- Before it shut down, Rebble (and others) scraped all 13,000 apps and metadata from the Pebble Appstore. Rebble began hosting a copy of the appstore. They created a new Dev Portal where developers could upload new apps, roughly 500 have been uploaded since July 2018.
- Rebble also reverse engineered many Pebble web services (weather, timeline and voice transcription) and provided them as a paid service for the Pebble community.
- Jan 2025 - Google open sourced PebbleOS, breathing new life into the community.
- March 2025 - I announced a new company (Core Devices) and 2 new watches - store.rePebble.com
- November 2025 - we finished shipping out 5,000 Pebble 2 Duos. We’re working hard on Pebble Time 2. We’re aiming to start shipping in January.
Their accusations#
Accusation 1: ‘Rebble paid for the work that [Eric] took as a base for his commercial watches’
Facts:
- I think they’re accusing me of ‘stealing’ open source contributions to PebbleOS that Rebble paid for. This is entirely false.
- We did not take any PebbleOS work Rebble paid for ‘as a base for [our] commercial watches’. To my best of my knowledge, Rebble never paid the developer who ported NimBLE into PebbleOS. My best guess is that they are referring to Rebble having paid CodeCoup, the company behind NimBLE, to fix some bugs that affected older non-Core Devices watches. Any Rebble-sponsored CodeCoup commits are not present in our repo. In fact, the opposite is true - we paid Codecoup $10,000 to fix multiple BLE stack issues, some of them on the host side that benefit all devices, including old Pebbles.
- We started using our own repo for PebbleOS development because PRs on the Rebble repo reviews were taking too long. We only had one firmware engineer at the time (now we have a whopping 2!) and he felt like he was being slowed down too much. All of our contributions to PebbleOS have been 100% open source.
- Overall, the feedback that PebbleOS could benefit from open governance is well taken. Long term, PebbleOS would be a good fit for open source organization with experience in open governance, like Apache or Linux Foundation. I wrote about this last week.
- With our small team and fairly quick development schedule, it's true that we haven't PRed our changes into Rebble’s repo. It’s tough to prioritize this while we are busy fixing bugs and getting ready for Pebble Time 2.
Accusation 2: ‘Core took Rebble’s work’ on libpebblecommon to create libpebble3
Facts:
The majority (>90%) of our new open source
libpebble3library was written by Core Devices employees. The remainder comes fromlibpebblecommon, another open source library written by two people.In April 2025, Core purchased the copyright to the
libpebblecommoncode from the two maintainers and incorporated it intolibpebble3**, which is also open source**.
By the end of October, Rebble has changed their mind about providing an archive file.
Our disagreement#
Not withstanding their false accusations of theft, the crux of our disagreement is the archive of 13,000 Pebble apps and watchfaces that were uploaded to the Pebble Appstore in July 2018 before it was shut down.
- I believe that these apps and watchfaces should be archived publicly and freely accessible by anyone. They should not held behind a walled garden by one organization. I repeatedly advocated for hosting this data on a neutral 3rd party like Archive.org.
- Rebble believes ‘the data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% Rebble’ (this is a direct quote from their blog post). They repeatedly refer to all watchfaces and watchapps as ‘our data’.
This is just plainly false. The apps and watchfaces were originally uploaded by individual developers to an appstore run by a company that no longer exists. These folks created beautiful work and shared them freely with the Pebble community. I’ve spoken with numerous Pebble app developers about this. After the fall of Pebble Tech Corp, none of them envisioned one single organization claiming ownership of their work and restricting access, or charging money for access.
Let’s do the right thing - honour the original developers and create a free publicly available archive of their beautiful watchfaces and watchapps.
Our plan for the future#
It's easy to assume the worst in situations like this. But our plan for the appstore is pretty straightforward. We’re working on rewriting the appstore frontend to be native in the mobile app rather than a web view. Rebble’s appstore backend API will be the data source. Rebble’s dev portal is where developers upload apps. No subscription or Rebble account will not be required to download apps. We intend to curate how the appstore is displayed Pebble app.
We’re excited to see other Pebble-supporting mobile apps pop up - like MicroPebble and GadgetBridge, offering different features and experiences. We’d love to support these efforts with open source code or financially.
Reading things like ‘We’re happy to let them build whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt Rebble’ in their blog post worries me. Take our voice-to-text and weather features. Rebble currently offers these as part of their paid subscription. Our new Pebble mobile app includes a on-device speech-to-text feature. We’re planning to include weather for free in our app and make the data available to all watchfaces so you don’t need to configure each one separately. These features are better for users but would they ‘hurt’ Rebble? Will I need to ask permission from Rebble before building these features? It’s clear that the goals of a non-profit and device manufacturer will not always be in alignment.
Now consider the appstore. It’s a fundamental part of the Pebble experience. Even before yesterday’s accusations, I felt wary about relying too heavily on a 3rd party like Rebble to provide such a critical service. When people buy a watch from Core Devices, they expect to be able to download apps and watchfaces. If Rebble leadership changes their mind, how can I be certain I can deliver a good experience for our customers? This is one of the primary reasons I think it’s important for an archive of the Pebble Appstore to be freely available.
Rebble still has the chance to redeem itself and do right by the community#
Rebble - prove that you believe in an open, unrestricted Pebble community. Tear down the walled garden you are trying to create. Publish your copy of the Pebble Appstore archive. Stop saying that you ‘100%’ own other developers data. Let’s move on from this ridiculous sideshow and focus on making Pebble awesome!
I’ve worked hard to structure everything that we’re doing to be sustainable for the long term, and to do right by the Pebble community. I think Rebble should do the same.
I earned almost nothing from Pebble Tech Corp. I paid myself a $65,000 salary each year. I did not get any payout through the asset sale. I fought to make sure that all Pebble employees were taken care of as best as possible, and that the Pebble community would live on. I believe that at every turn, I’ve done right by the community.
I didn’t relaunch Pebble to make a lot of money. My goal this time round is to make it sustainable. I want to continue making more watches and cool gadgets. There are no investors. I am taking huge risks doing this. I relaunched it because I love Pebble and want it to live on long into the future. Generally, I am excited and positive for the future, despite everything.
For everyone else, again, I apologize for the extreme amounts of inside baseball and the better things you could be doing with your time. I’ll leave the comments open here. Please refrain from any personal attacks or vicious comments (at myself or other people) - follow the HN guidelines.
Eric Migicovsky
Read the original article
Comments
By xyzzy_plugh 2025-11-1818:114 reply I view this entire thing through an extremely simple, reductive lens:
Rebble effectively had free reign on this ecosystem for years, and could have at any time decided to try and capitalize on it further. They still can! But instead they're apparently interested in rent seeking while Core makes real headway.
It's clear that Eric and Core want to make something now. It's not clear what Rebble wants, but it's clear they are feeling left out. That obviously sucks but it's clear from what both sides are saying that Core has been trying to involve Rebble in their efforts. That's certainly noble and I'm not sure others would do the same.
Would Eric be able to do this all without Rebble? Lots of commenters have been saying "no" but I'm skeptic. I was an early Pebble user. I stopped using it before they went bust, and while I was aware of Rebble, there was nothing compelling there for me. It's neat that they have maintained a copy of the original watchfaces but beyond that I don't perceive a ton of value. I don't like the subscription fee. I'm sad they never took a serious crack at making a Rebble watch.
I hope everyone finds a way forward, together, but I'm not optimistic.
By johnmaguire 2025-11-1818:222 reply The subscription fee was what enabled them to host these services. From their blog post, they mention spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure and software. I expect that the connections and skills involved in running the Rebble web services don't directly translate to creating a hardware product.
That said, I think you are right that Rebble is feeling left out - and that it is hard to figure out exactly how they can fit into Core's vision. But I think there are a couple of primary and immediate issues:
1. Core wants Rebble's data - so clearly there is value here, but Core is framing this debacle like Rebble is irrelevant. Also, I don't know that Google would've ever released PebbleOS if Rebble didn't exist
2. Rebble wants to see the future of Pebble remain open-source or at least compatible with their services, so that if Pebble goes bust again, the community can continue on
Core doesn't want Rebble's data. They want the data from the original Pebble store, which is not owned by Rebble. It's the work of thousands of independent developers and it should be shared freely, not kept in a walled garden with "no scraping" terms added on. It's actually offensive that Rebble is using other developers' data (that they originally scraped from Pebble) as a bargaining chip in their contract negotiation that they made into a public squabble.
By nosrepa 2025-11-1820:38 By johnmaguire 2025-11-1820:391 reply I don't think that's quite right - Rebble has updated a number of these apps to keep them supported. As sibling commenter posted, the original apps are available publicly.
By xyzzy_plugh 2025-11-1818:373 reply I'll be totally honest: I have no idea what they possibly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on. That seems totally absurd and reckless.
Seems cheap to me. Host anything and you're gonna need developers. Developers are expensive. A hundred thousand dollars is pretty much what you'd pay for a single developer in a year. 5 Devs is still a small team and that's half a million dollars per year.
By notpushkin 2025-11-1914:401 reply There are countries other than the US.
Yeah. If they’d said “hundreds, or maybe thousands of dollars”, ok, sure. But that just cannot possibly be an inherently expensive service to host.
By joelhaasnoot 2025-11-1819:052 reply There is also weather and voice recognition services. If implemented with third party APIs those costs can add up.
By quantumwoke 2025-11-1819:24 Developer time?
By infotainment 2025-11-1821:534 reply Agreed -- While I admire their work in keeping the lights on, Rebble doesn't necessarily make sense in a world where the "real" Pebble company has returned.
Keep in mind that this is their goal statement (straight from their FAQ):
> Our goal is to maintain and advance Pebble functionality, in the absence of Pebble Technology Corp.
Eric's new company, by effectively re-creating Pebble Technology Corp, is an existential threat to that mission: If there is someone else maintaining and advancing Pebble functionality, then what is the purpose of Rebble? It does seem unfortunate though -- I hope they can all work something out.
By computably 2025-11-1823:371 reply Alternatively, I could say that Eric Migicovsky's track record is building a for-profit company that ultimately failed, and with the new company, he obviously, explicitly intends to prioritize selling new hardware. Whereas Rebble kept the lights on for devices that would otherwise have been bricks, as a collective of volunteer hackers.
Their missions conflict because Pebble2's potential customers largely overlap with Rebble's current users, but I would say their aims are quite different.
By philipallstar 2025-11-1913:06 You could also say his track record is making things as open as possible so things like Rebble can spring up if necessary, but also in negotating deals that keep core services running for years after the purchase, and then after the purchaser's purchase.
By spiffytech 2025-11-1822:311 reply I largely agree, but I think there's merit to Rebble's argument that Core Devices could be here today, gone tomorrow. I'd hate to see Pebble die again only for Rebble to have disbanded in the meanwhile. Then the community has nothing but code repos.
By micromacrofoot 2025-11-1822:45 the OS is open sourced, so it's much less attached to Core Devices than the first go around
By intothemild 2025-11-1912:05 Could pebble2 launch with a minimal set of apps, asking the old Devs to push their binaries again? Sure, and with that in mind, all this deal with rebble does is save everyone time.
The way this reads, is a group of enthusiasts got together to create a lifeboat for people who wanted to keep their pebble devices alive... But are now building a moat around said life raft.
If they truly cared about the devices, the users, and the developers.. they would just drop this attitude and move forward.
Another interpretation is that for rebble the worst thing that could happen, was Eric coming back and restarting pebble.
Maybe they need a secret ‘Second Rebble’, hidden within Pebble, to take over if it collapses again.
By philipallstar 2025-11-1913:06 It's open source now, so that's already taken care of.
By micromacrofoot 2025-11-1821:111 reply Yeah agreed, and I hope the Rebble people read this. They're being very protective and Eric is seemingly trying to include them when he could literally just shut them out.
They did good work in absence of anyone maintaining the product, but they're running software on a product they literally did nothing to build.
It's not just running it, they have built on top of it. Embrace, extend, extinguish is exactly what the Rebble team is afraid of. If extinguished and Core goes bust, the community would be left holding the bag yet again. Rebble doesn't want that, why would they.
By agloe_dreams 2025-11-2013:291 reply Isn’t EEE exactly what Rebble is doing?
They embraced the the pebble community with a copy of the App Store, extended it with their own weather apis and the like, and then now are trying to extinguish any ability for Core to implement their own solution without paying them more.
By Avamander 2025-11-2016:42 No. Core can absolutely implement their own, just not on top of their work.
By micromacrofoot 2025-11-1914:151 reply But they wouldn't be extinguished? Core is literally offering to pay them per user and the OS is open sourced... how could they be extinguished under the deal as outlined?
Core could easily say "actually we won't support Rebble at all it's too complicated to maintain this relationship"... and Rebble would then only exist as long as people are willing to maintain the now decade-old original watches... which is a difficult task given the availability of superior hardware from the original manufacturer.
With the Core deal they could actually grow and they get a significantly longer lease on life even if the hardware company fails again.
I've seen you make the comment about the OS being open-sourced a lot. But this largely has nothing to do with the OS. This is a conversation about infrastructure and data. The concern (from what I gathered and will condense greatly) is that Core will take in all the current app data and infrastructure setup, duplicate it themselves, move themselves off of Rebble, and continue developing on it privately.
By ls-a 2025-11-195:08 I've heard not so positive things about doing business with this dude. I'm not surprised by this toxicity around the product
Summarizing the dispute, for anyone interested:
Rebble's "one red line" is "there has to be a future for Rebble in there." They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out. There's also emphasis on "our work," "we built this," "we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." They feel Eric isn't acknowledging where his infrastructure came from.
Core Devices' thing is explicitly stating concern about relying on a third party (Rebble) for "critical services" his customers depend on. If "Rebble leadership changes their mind," they can't guarantee customer experience. They wants the app store archive to be "freely available" and "not controlled by one organization." They don't want to need "permission from Rebble" before building features (like free weather, voice-to-text) that might compete with Rebble's paid services. The fundamental fear seems to be business risk: being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Neither side seems to trust the other's long-term intentions, creating an impasse where both feel existentially threatened by the other's preferred arrangement.
My take: I bought a watch in 2014. After the pebble 2 duo black fiasco (they ran out of stock, offered a white instead which I accepted 2 weeks ago, never shipped, and have ghosted my emails asking for shipping timelines.) I had high hopes, but given the messy interaction with the OSS world I'm considering cancelling my order for the duo and time two.
By margalabargala 2025-11-1819:303 reply > They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out.
It's understandable that Rebble fears someone doing this, since this is what Rebble did.
Rebble took the original open-source Pebble work of thousands of independent developers, scraped it off the original store, and is re-offering it within their own walled garden and calling it "theirs".
It's great Rebble kept things alive but they seem to be fearing a second one of themselves.
> being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Both Rebble and Core Devices are for-profit companies, neither is a non-profit, so I'm not actually sure which you're referring to here.
Rebble sounds pretty much like a non profit to me
> The Rebble Foundation is a non-profit organization that keeps the Pebble community alive. rebble.io
By margalabargala 2025-11-1819:562 reply They aren't a 501c3. When I wrote my original comment I did a search for Rebble among all 501c3 ores and they are not there.
I looked closer after your comment. They appear to be a "Michigan Domestic Non-Profit Corporation".
Why aren't they a 501c3? I have no idea. It makes me trust them less to be honest, that they are some sort of nonprofit but not a 501c3.
I am neither an accountant nor a lawyer, but I have set up a 501c3 before.
I think you have a misunderstanding of how that works. In many cases, you need both the state and federal non-profit designation (i.e. a Michigan domestic non-profit corporation would not pay state income taxes on charitable income + that same corporation would need the 501c3 designation from the IRS to have the same benefit at the federal level).
Do you have positive confirmation that they are not filing as a 501c3?
>> They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out.
> It's understandable that Rebble fears someone doing this, since this is what Rebble did.
That's an extremely uncharitable take. It's not like Rebble drove Pebble out of business. What I gather is basically Pebble fell apart on its own, and Rebble picked up the pieces to keep things working.
It seems what Core wants do here is take what Rebble build/maintained and drive Rebble into irrelevance.
By philipallstar 2025-11-1913:11 > It seems what Core wants do here is take what Rebble build/maintained and drive Rebble into irrelevance.
Why do you think that Pebble wants to drive Rebble into irrelevance if they're keeping the app store and Pebble is paying them to do that?
> Both Rebble and Core Devices are for-profit companies, neither is a non-profit, so I'm not actually sure which you're referring to here.
Looks like Rebble is now a nonprofit?
> have evolved along the way from a loose collection of co-conspirators, to Rebble Alliance, LLC, to our current non-profit Rebble Foundation [1]
1: https://rebble.io/2025/10/09/rebbles-in-a-world-with-core.ht...
By margalabargala 2025-11-1820:213 reply I did some digging in a reply to a sibling comment.
Basically, they are not a 501c3. They are a Michigan state specific nonprofit. My original comment was made after a 501c3 search turned up nothing.
I don't know why they would decline to be a 501c3 and instead only be a Michigan nonprofit.
The 501c3 tax exception is specifically for charitable organizations, and the law and IRS interpretations exclude a number of groups that would colloquially fall under that description. On top of that there are many groups who aren't doing charitable work, but want to reinvest all revenue back into the organization and not be beholden to shareholders (private or public).
Huh that seems very odd. And it's strange (and possibly misleading) to say you are a "non-profit" under these circumstances.
Any chance they recently changed status, and it's just not showing up yet?
Core went bankrupt once doing exactly what they want to do now. I think the concern users will be left holding the bag, again, is reasonable.
Pebble went out of business but Core is set up very differently. They have an incredibly lean team and Eric appears to have self-funded much of the HW and SW development before taking a dime from customers.
There's a chance that some awful fate will befall Eric, of course, but other than that I am not especially concerned that the new company will fold. Eric seems to understand what caused that outcome, and is specifically looking to avoid making the same mistakes.
By protocolture 2025-11-1823:512 reply It could sell, it could enshittify. Trusting a founder seems daft in the year of our lord 2025.
By philipallstar 2025-11-1913:121 reply It sold last time and ensured things kept running in the process.
Does it? I'm more about trusting persons than ever. When the shareholders comes, thats when the enshitification process really starts. I also wish Tony Fadell would take over Nest again.
They sent an email a few minutes after I posted, saying that their fulfillment centre dropped the ball and they're escalating internally. I guess complaining on HN worked.
Hope they can figure out the dispute with Rebble. Maybe they end up hosting apps on a package manager and create some binding contract?
There are also a bunch of cancelled order right now, so maybe they suddenly had a surplus of available devices...
Yeah. I bought a black duo out of nostalgia and wanting pebble to succeed, but not interested in the time and realized I don't love them enough to want to wear a white one. Fickle me, I guess.
By yjftsjthsd-h 2025-11-1916:29 Yeah, I wanted a black duo but find the white and time to be really ugly. OTOH I read someone saying that their duo came with really bad buttons, probably as a result of the parts laying in a warehouse for years, so maybe I dodged a bullet...
By gcr 2025-11-1914:59 It seems like that's exactly the sot of agreement that was proposed and then fell through.
By trklausss 2025-11-1914:27 It is the HashiCorp fiasco all over again. HashiCorp thinks third-party is profiting from Terraform, they relicense, Terraform gets forked into OpenTofu.
Here, Rebble says Core is profiting from their work (hey, look at your licenses). It would be a direct violation of their ToS though, since there is this clause:
> 4. Services Usage Limits > > You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, access to the Service, or Content accessed through use of the Service, without Rebble’s express written permission.
So I don't know what to think honestly, I don't see any bad actors here...
The amount of internet drama a smartwatch that stopped being produced ten years ago generates even to this day is truly incredible. Nothing that's happening here is so important as to make enemies, and the fact that Core Devices even wants to use the open source app store and is willing to pay for it should have been an immediate "Yes, that's incredible, lets make it work" from Rebble. So what if they get bought by Fitbit or go closed source? Rebble will just be back to where they were before. That's the beauty of open source; it doesn't need them, it just needs people who are interested in the project.
By lopis 2025-11-199:08 Exactly. The fact that Rebble is against trying to make Pebble completely open made me lose trust in them. I thought that was the whole point of Rebble.
By lenkite 2025-11-199:09 > So what if they get bought by Fitbit or go closed source? Rebble will just be back to where they were before
How can they be back to where they are if it goes closed source ?
By postexitus 2025-11-1910:15 Reminds me of Genesi / Hyperion wars in late Amiga days.
