On December 7th, 2016, Pebble announced that they were ceasing operations. Two days later, on December 9th, 2016, the Rebble web site went live, announcing our intention to "maintain and advance Pebble functionality, in the absence of Pebble Technology Corp." We have fulfilled much of this goal via Rebble Web Services, which restores most of the functionality that the Pebble community knows and loves. Read about our journey in the blog, find detailed instructions in our setup guide, or simply...
Join RebbleHi All, today we are happy to announce that the new Rebble developer portal is live! This has been in the works for a while now, and involved extending the capabilities of the appstore backend, as well as building a new frontend.
The result is a shiny new way for you to upload, update, and manage your apps and watchfaces on the Rebble store, replacing the cumbersome old rebble.io/submit process! Let’s take a look.
It’s a tribute to Pebble’s vision and engineering prowess that their watches still provide value to tens of thousands of wearers more than four years after their much-lamented demise — of course, we may have helped along the way, but a lot of things “just work” as they always have. One exception to this, however, is the ability to sideload Pebble apps and firmware on modern Android devices — even Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky ran into difficulties with a .pbz file recently, and while we got it working, there are many more hoops to jump through than the average user should have to deal with. Hence our introduction of Sideload Helper by Rebble — the missing bridge between Pebble files and the legacy Pebble app!
Hello, hello! Joshua here, with some exciting news. @ishotjr and I were chatting some recently, and we’ve been super excited by some of the things that people have been working on in Discord. We were wondering to ourselves: what can we do to make it even more exciting to contribute? Well, we took a look at the Rebble Alliance’s books, and we’re happy to announce something new: Rebble Grants!
Rebble Grants are our new plan to reinvest some of the proceeds from running the Rebble Web Services into development that keeps Pebble watches – and the Rebble service! – running well into the future. We’ve been saving up a little money over the past few years (!) of running the service (more on that in “The Shiny Rebble Future”, from last year), and we’ve allocated $25,000 to fund all kinds of things that might make the world a little better for Rebblers! Some of the things we hope to fund are:
Of course, if you want to do something that you think fits within our general goals, but that we didn’t list above, please let us know and we’ll tell you if it’s a match! We’re looking to fund all different sizes of projects, big to small; we’ll offer funding proportional to the importance of the proposal to the Rebble Alliance’s goals, and of course proportional to the amount of work that it’ll be to do it. Remember that you can submit multiple grants, so you can decide whether you want to go big right away, or whether you want to break things up into phases.
If you’re ready, you can submit a grant proposal starting right now! And if you just want to chat about it, we’re here for you – come talk to @joshua or @ishotjr on Discord.
We’re super excited to be launching this – we’re thrilled about getting to invest more in Pebble into the future, and we love the idea of kickstarting a new wave of Pebble development. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with!