Rebbles in a World with Core
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 technologies[^1]. 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!
[^1] 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.
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