Bring life back to your Pebble

Feb 1, 2021 • by Ish Ot Jr.

Get a (Side)load of our New Android App!

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!

Sep 4, 2020 • by Joshua Wise

Announcing: Rebble Grants!

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:

• work on a replacement mobile app for Pebble;
• development on the RebbleOS firmware replacement project;
• design work that supports the Rebble Alliance’s goals;
• new features for Rebble Web Services; and
• development on new watchapps or watchfaces.

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!

Apr 13, 2020 • by Will Murphy

Squeezing the most out of your Pebble

Hi there! It’s Will here (some of you may know me as @Will0 on Discord). In the ~6 months since our last blog post a lot has happened, both in the Pebbleverse and the real world. Yet, despite the ever-increasing gap between the Pebble shutdown and today, still new people are signing up with Rebble to bring their beloved smartwatch back to life!

On that note, there have been a number of similar questions over the last few months on Reddit and the Rebble Discord, such as ‘why do I need to use RWS’, ‘I’m struggling to get setup’, ‘What are the best apps to use in 2020?’.

In this post we’ll go over the answer to all of these, as well as cover how you can squeeze the most out of your Pebble in 2020.

Let’s start with the easy questions first…