Dec 27, 2025 • by Joshua Wise

Rebble Foundation Finances 2025 #Wrapped!

Hi everyone! It’s me, Joshua, your friendly Treasurer for the Rebble Foundation. We promised earlier this year that we were going to find ways to be more transparent with how Rebble is run – so I wanted to provide an update on our finances for this year, so you can see what we’re spending money on, where it’s going, and how we’re doing!

Anyway, I just finished the QuickBooks review for December, and I am happy to say that our financial situation is decently strong. So first off, here’s a table of our cash flow for this calendar year. (There are some notes below.) Our fiscal year closes in June, so this isn’t a formal ‘annual report’. But given this is coming in December, it obviously is a #Wrapped!

Foundation Financial Overview

Rebble Foundation Financial Report
Starting Cash on Hand		$508,407
Income		+$87,457
	Subscription revenue	$82,054
	Interest income	$5,403
Program Expenditures		-$37,320
	Initial port of NimBLE to PebbleOS (Hexxeh)	$18,000
	MicroPebble iOS initial work (Intent sp. z o.o.)	$11,000
	NimBLE debug assistance for Snowy (Codecoup sp. z o.o.)	$7,000
	pebble.nix Apple Silicon hardware subsidy (Ruby)	$820
	Hackathon #002	$500
Administrative Expenses		-$30,138
	Legal fees for Foundation startup (Bodman PLC)	$14,068
	Federal tax	$11,955
	Accountant fees (Curcuru & Associates CPA)	$2,800
	Software: G Suite; 1Password; QuickBooks Online; Acodei; Zendesk; Figma	$1,315
Cost of Goods Sold		-$22,452
	The Weather Company	$8,652
	GCP	$6,585
	Honeycomb	$6,435
	Algolia	$420
	AWS	$360
Ending Cash on Hand		$509,315
	2025 Profit / Loss	+$908

Notes

• These data were collected from January 1, 2025, to December 25, 2025. Our fiscal year actually ends in June but I really wanted to get a report out for the end of the year, and most people don’t think in fiscal years anyway, so there you have it.
• Figures are not fully final (various service fees / bank fees / etc. are not included in this report).
• Heck yes you read that right! MicroPebble iOS initial work! More on that in a blog post soon.
• The ending cash on hand does not quite add up because there are outstanding liabilities to GCP / Honeycomb / etc that were accounted above. However, the cash on hand was taken directly from our bank account numbers, and does represent our real position.
• Rebble Foundation is a non-profit in the State of Michigan, but it is not an IRS-registered tax-exempt non-profit under code 501(c). What this means is that we do not pay tax to the State of Michigan, but we do pay United States Federal tax. Our non-profit structure ensures that no individual people have an ownership share in Rebble, and that governance happens in accordance with the by-laws, rather than in the interests of maximizing profits for shareholders.

Treasurer’s Report

Hey, these numbers are not too bad! Here are some of my interpretations of the above.

One of the big concerns that I’ve had for a long time is that we have not been spending enough to benefit the community – as you can see by our $500,000 in cash on hand that we started and finished the year with. (We’ve been running Rebble for quite a while now!) To that end, I had hoped that we would not turn a profit this year, and we’d start spending that down. We didn’t quite achieve that, but I’m not too upset about where we landed: hitting break-even roughly within 1% on a ~$90,000 operating budget is pretty good.

Similarly, I am encouraged that we are starting to ramp our spending up on Pebble-related projects, rather than just web services. This year, we spent roughly an equal amount on contributors inside our community, and also on engaging external services to perform tasks that we haven’t been able to do on our own. I’d like to continue that trend into 2026 – we should be using our resources both to extend the reach of what we can do, and to reward people inside the Rebble community who are doing cool things that contribute to the Pebble movement!

We spent lot of money this year on administrative tasks – we incurred nearly $14,000 in legal expenses. This is not a surprise – setting up a legal entity is expensive and time-consuming! I expect that next year we will spend less money on those tasks, and we can use that additional funding to invest in our community.

I believe that our financial position is strong. For 2026, from the Treasurer’s perspective, I have the following recommendations for the rest of the Board:

• We should continue to increase our investment in the community in 2026 by increasing our program expenditures. I recommend a target of at least $60,000 in program expenditures, with a target of splitting this approximately equally between recipients inside the community and external resources to augment our capabilities.
• Our financial position is strong, and we can afford to dip into our savings if we can identify programs that provide good value for our community. It is acceptible to run a deficit in 2026.
• Our highest goods-sold expense is weather data. We should consider finding ways to provide more value to subscribers using these data – for instance, adding APIs so that watchfaces and watchapps can use weather data that subscribers are already paying for, and finding ways to provide weather data on new Core watches.
• At this time, we do not urgently need to seek out other revenue sources, but it may be useful to lay the groundwork for doing so, especially if we can increase our program spending. We should evaluate in the second half of the year if we are on track to meet our spending targets, and if so, we should consider giving our community options to fund our work other than subscriptions.
• Traditionally, Rebble has had difficulty effectively spending on our programming because of our limited administrative bandwidth. We should consider finding a part-time paid executive director to help us achieve our goals in how we want to invest in the community.

On behalf of the Rebble board, we’re looking forward to continuing to serve you in the new year!

Dec 9, 2025 • by Ish Ot Jr.

Happy Rebble Day: the Dev Forum is back!

Today, December 9th, is Rebble Day – the 9th anniversary of the official birth of Rebble – and what better way to celebrate than by sharing the latest evolution of our developer community? I vividly remember the original Pebble forums, where I received help, became inspired, and even began friendships that still endure today. We’ve spent the past decade primarily organizing and socializing on Discord (hey, come join us!), but I have to say, there is something to be said for classic discussion forums. Sure, it was a simpler time back then, but that doesn’t mean that slower, linear, searchable discussions have to be a thing of the past: as the Pebble developer community keeps growing, we’ve been thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to get all of the knowledge that we’ve all assembled into one place that was designed to last? That’s why we’re excited to announce today the launch of the new Rebble dev forum – forum.rebble.io!

The forum is a place to learn from others, get help, discuss hardware old and new, show off your latest watchfaces and apps, collaborate on smartstraps (still my favourite!), and, most importantly, post pics of pets! The forums have only been live (with no promotion until now) for about a week, and already we have dozens of users sharing over a hundred posts across more than fifty topics.

One of the coolest features is our appstore integration – since the forum login is based on your Rebble/Rebble developer account, you can share your detailed appstore listing in the forums and get feedback, encouragement, organize beta testing, and more! In fact, each new or updated app automatically gets its own forum post:

and each appstore listing now contains a link back to its own forum thread so that your users can chat and cheer you on!

We’ve seen some really great interactions happening already, such as in irek’s Naïve watchface thread where they’ve been sharing updates, coordinating betas, receiving encouragement, and making fun connections.

I’ve been constantly impressed with how amazing our community has been on Discord, with some the smartest and kindest people that I’ve seen all in one place, teaching and learning and sharing. It’s been amazing to see dozens of developers already starting to share tips, solve problems, and collaborate on the new Rebble dev forum – why not take a moment to stop in and say hi? And of course, don’t forget to share what’s on your wrist!

Nov 24, 2025 • by the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors

Rebble in your own world

It’s been a bit of a rough ride in the Pebble world lately. Since our blogpost from last week, and Eric’s response to it (read both, if you haven’t yet - there’s a lot of important context in them!), we’ve heard a lot of feedback from the community about the situation we find ourselves in.

When we said we wanted your input in our last post, we meant it - we’ve been closely watching and participating in the conversations since. Thank you to everyone for giving your input, and for being kind to each other in the process! We’re genuinely blown away by how little we’ve had to step in and moderate heated discussions - couldn’t be prouder of this little community we’ve built together. <3

We’ll be honest - our last blogpost was more inflammatory than it needed to be. We’ve been at this for a while, trying to negotiate a deal with Core Devices while also trying to figure out what we want out of that deal at the same time. Clearly, a lot of the tensions we’ve been feeling in that process spilled out there, and it wasn’t as productive as we would have liked as a result.

If anything, it’s made one thing clear to us - we should have gotten the community’s input much earlier! In hindsight, a lot of the division could have been avoided with the level-headed insight you all have given us over the past few days. We’re sorry for letting it get to this point – no one benefits from a fight between Core and Rebble.

We’ve been so appreciative of all of the feedback that we’ve heard. Many of you have given us words of support, and offered your trust and kindness (thank you so much!) – and many of you have also given us hard (and, often, well-deserved!) criticism and suggestions for how we can improve. Today, we want to give you a few concrete steps we’re taking as a result of what you’ve told us, to make sure that we’re worthy of your trust long into the future. Here’s a summary of what we want to talk about:

• We believe that the apps that you made belong to you. We didn’t make that clear enough, and we want to fix that, including by offering for download an archive of the Rebble App Store.
• We have a better understanding of how Eric interacted with the App Store API, and we don’t think that he intended to “steal” from us there.
• We’ve added two more members to the Board of Directors of the Rebble Foundation! And we’re improving the Foundation’s governance to be more transparent.
• We’re ready to figure out what’s next.

Updated November 24th, 8pm Pacific: The app store archives are now available!

On the Rebble App Store

By far, one of the most common criticisms we heard from Core Devices and the community was:

Why does Rebble think they own everything on the Rebble App Store?

It’s a great question! We spent a while scratching our head about this, because, to be clear, we don’t believe this at all.

Of course we don’t own every single app and watchface published to the App Store - those are owned by the people who put in the effort to produce them in the first place! As maintainers of the App Store, our jobs are to get them to users that want them – and to keep them safe, so that effort doesn’t end up lost to time. We don’t want to claim ownership over everyone’s apps - that would be a huge disservice to our amazing community of app developers.

Our last blogpost didn’t do us any favours in this regard, though. The first version contained the following wording:

What you now know as the Pebble App Store from Eric’s new company, Core Devices, is the result of nearly a decade of our work. The data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% Rebble.

A lot of people told us that they interpreted this as “everything in the App Store is 100% owned by Rebble”. Honestly, we can’t really blame them for interpreting it like that (even if we feel it’s a little uncharitable). It was a rough choice of wording on our part, and we should have been a lot clearer from the outset – that shouldn’t have made it to our final copy.

We’ve since edited that section to make our intentions a lot clearer - the part of the App Store that’s 100% Rebble is the maintenance, operation and curation of the App Store itself, not the apps it hosts. We’re sorry we gave the impression that we owned all of your apps and watchfaces - that was never our intention, and we should have been a lot more careful about how we phrased it.

The App Store’s apps and watchfaces belong to the community, not to Rebble. We’ve always believed this, and we don’t intend to change our stance on that anytime soon. In the past, we thought that we could do the best for the community by avoiding fragmentation of the app store. Former Pebble engineer Lance R. Vick had an insightful comment thread on Hacker News that meaningfully changed our opinion: we still think that, as a community, we can build the best app store for the Pebbleverse, but we think he’s right that other people should get to try out their own “alternative visions” for the Pebble ecosystem.

So on that front, we’re publishing a complete archive of all apps and watchfaces on the Rebble App Store for everyone to download and use. You can download it right now on the dev portal (thanks to the modern world of AI scrapers wasting huge amounts of bandwidth, you’ll have to log in, but then click on the gear and click on the download link!). The archive will update each month with the latest export from our database. The archives are free for you to do whatever you want with them - share them around, keep your own backups, anything that you come up with! We only ask that if you do use our archives to make something, please leave a prominent note saying that you got it from us, and provide a link to the archives so people know where you got them from. You don’t have to, but we’d be sad if you didn’t. :(

On Stealing Allegations

One of the main accusations we made in our first post was about Eric scraping the App Store. It was so prominent that it’s even in the title of the post - “Core Devices keeps stealing our work”. At the time, we felt pretty justified in making that claim (we wouldn’t have made it otherwise, obviously). But now that we’ve had some time to cool off, and reflect on things with level heads… yeah, we’ve gotta be totally honest here. This accusation was definitely overheated.

A brief timeline of events from our perspective is in order, so we can explain how we got here. On the 11th of November, there was a very large spike of requests to the App Store for roughly 3,600 watchfaces. On the 14th November, after digging into the logs, we identified that the traffic came from an IP that had made other requests from Eric’s personal Rebble account.

At the time, negotiations around the App Store with Core had already significantly deteriorated, in some of the other ways we discussed in our post. Given that context, we could only assume that this activity was Eric testing a scraper for the App Store.

Snapshot of the App Store logs from November 11th

On the 16th of November, we learnt that Eric had built an application to help him curate a “Top Picks” section for Core Device’s App Store frontend. We had no source code for this yet, but in our concern for how things were going, we assumed that this was part of a larger tool that he had planned to use around these scraped data. After our discussions fell apart on Monday afternoon, our blogpost went out that evening, with the scraping accusations still included.

From the source code that Eric released, we now know that this was not scraping with the intent of supplanting the App Store, but instead with the intent of augmenting its capabilities. We may have been upset with his conduct in other parts of the negotiation process, but Eric’s interactions with our appstore API were surely not meant to be “stealing”, and we no longer consider them that way.

Once we understood this, we should have edited our previous blog post. And we should have done it much sooner, but here we are: we’ve since added some text at the top to reflect this reality, and we can (and wish to) apologize to Eric for taking so long.

[Rebble Foundation intensifies]

One of the common things that we heard – from the community, and from Eric – is that people don’t understand what the Rebble Foundation does, how the Foundation operates, and that we haven’t done a good enough job of being transparent enough to earn your trust. We heard of a few concrete things that would help, and we agree and obviously we should just do them! Here are a handful of things that we’re doing to improve the Foundation’s governance:

• Board elections. Soon, some seats will turn over on the board! Until now, we’ve been co-opting on the Board (i.e., the existing Board agrees to put people on the Board). We’re going to set up a structure so that the community can have a more direct say in how the Foundation is run.
• Meeting notes. We’ve been meeting informally by Discord. This is effective, but we actually need to set more formal plans! The Board is going to meet at least once a quarter in a form that enables us to set goals, and put them on record – and then share them with you all.
• Budget transparency. A handful of folks asked how we were spending our money, and thought it sounded like we were holding our funds as a secret. We don’t intend to be that way, but “just posting on Discord here and there” is not a great way to communicate! The Board will report on our financial situation, and what we’re spending money on, and make that public.

Basically, we should have done all of these things a long time ago – this is how good non-profit governance should work. We got so distracted by all of the noise with setting up the Foundation, and with negotiating about our relationship with Core, that we’ve been making much slower progress on this kind of infrastructure than we would have liked! So watch this space – we anticipate having something to report by the end of January.

And, finally, amidst an otherwise dour blog post, we actually do have some good news to report. We’re excited to add two new members to the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors, bringing our total up to five Directors! We’re happy to welcome:

• Ruby Iris Juric, who you may also know as srxl. She’s been maintaining developer.rebble.io for months now, and has been a real champion of making that experience better for users.
• Stasia Michalska, who you may also know as LCP. They have been recently on an absolute tear of making improvements to the App Store backend, and adding Timeline topics support! Stasia also brings some desperately-needed governance experience from their work on openSUSE.

In addition to their recent contributions, both Ruby and Stasia have been long-time community members and are all-around Good People To Have in the Rebble community. We’re so glad that they’ll be contributing their skills to more directly shape the future of Rebble, and we hope that you will be too!

Settling Disputes

Fighting sucks. We don’t want to keep fighting with Core Devices - no one gets anything out of that. At the end of the day, we want to find a deal with Core that works for Rebble, for Core, and for the broader Pebble community. Concretely, we have no intentions of shutting off access to Rebble Web Services for Core’s watches, nor do we have any desire to. If we must do so at some point in the future, we commit to providing at least a month’s notice before making any changes.

But we do need a usage deal in place, so we can ensure the reliability of our services for Core Devices’ customers. Many people within the community have suggested bringing in a third-party mediator to help us figure out how to work together. We think that’s a great idea, and we’re ready to do that whenever Eric is.

One of the things that we’ve understood from both our blog post and Eric’s is that we have real common ground: what matters to both of us is keeping the Pebble ecosystem alive and kicking. And from the community reaction, what we hear is clear: we can only do that by working together. If you’re reading, Eric - we’re prepared to come back to the table whenever you are. Let’s both do our best to give your users the best possible Pebble experience.

Brighter Days Ahead

Ever since our inception, Rebble’s goal has always been to keep the Pebble community alive. Keeping Pebble alive means more than just Rebble Web Services, a mobile app, and developer tools - it means keeping the space as inclusive, accessible, and welcoming as possible. We have let a lot of anger and division get in the way of a healthy Pebble community. For that, we’re really, truly sorry. We want to get things back on track, and get back to what we all do best - keeping our favourite smartwatches ticking away.

To everyone who has stuck with us up to this point: thank you so, so much. The feedback you’ve given us has been immensely useful for figuring out what our next steps should be. You’ve all been overwhelmingly civil and productive (even when we haven’t!) and we can’t wait to get back to making our Pebbles better than they’ve ever been before with you all. We’ve all got brighter days to look forward to - let’s keep making awesome happen, together.

And as always, we’d love to hear any more feedback that you have. Please feel free to get in touch on Discord, or by e-mailing us, at board@rebble.foundation.

Yours in hope, the new Rebble Board of Directors, David, Joshua, Ruby, Stasia, and Will

Nov 19, 2025 • by Joshua Wise

Some Personal Thoughts On This Whole Mess

Hi all – Joshua here. I wanted to write down some personal thoughts about this whole mess. (If you missed it, we – Rebble – wrote a blog post Monday evening in which we had some relatively spicy things to say about how our collaboration with Eric and Core Devices was going; Eric also wrote a blog post responding to ours, of course.) I’m saying these mostly without my Rebble hat on – opinions in here are mine, and do not represent the Board (though I imagine others might share some of these thoughts).

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about, like, what actually happened here. It is clear to me that this is not just (or even at all?) about watches, or ownership of data, or web services. As far as I can tell, we are closer than we are distant on most things, and there are a few sticking points. At the end of the day, they are just computers, and everybody oughta go touch grass on that front… myself included. I’m not going to talk about technical or contractual things at all in this post.

So if it’s not that, what is this about? There is something more fundamental at play here, and I guess it feels like a question of basic respect.

Just so you are prepared, here’s the arc of what I’m about to lay out: first, I am going to be kind of critical, because, after all, I have my own feelings of anger about this, and I’d better blow off some steam before I can make nice! Then, I am going to look at some of the things that have made me feel more positively about this whole thing. And finally, I am going to moderately think about what we can learn from those, and how that informs what going forward looks like. Strap in, dear reader.

In which I am critical

OK, so first off: I don’t really want to respond point-by-point to Eric’s blog post, but I am going to say one thing about this. I am the Board member that he referred to a few times in his post. The screenshots of Signal conversations are with me; I was not asked about those, and had I been asked, I would have preferred that those screenshots not be shown.

But what I said there is real, and I think it’s important. I have had real conversations with Eric about a lot of things, not just as a coworker, but as a friend; you can see in those conversations that I vent about problems that were going to affect both of us.

This is how people relate when they trust each other; you can see that comfort clearly in what we had to say to each other. Most of what I said there was in my personal capacity, not in my capacity as Rebble. Personally, I felt pretty disrespected and hurt to see those conversations show up in public.

Even before Eric responded, I was reading some of the comments on Reddit, especially from some of the people who worked on Rebble over the past years, and this is what crystalized for me. I read Katharine’s comment, and I remembered when she left how some of those interactions had gone. I remembered at the time how she felt like her contributions were on the verge of being erased by neglect. I read what Lavender had to say, and the way she described feeling like we were being “muscled out”.

And then I read what Ruby had to say, which you should read if you haven’t yet. (My cards on the table: I find it heartbreaking.) She has put an enormous amount of effort into this. She said that she felt betrayed and strung along, but the word that stuck out to me is that she felt disrespected.

It crystalized that this wasn’t about watches at all. More than anything, it seems like the people behind Rebble wanted respect as partners, and a little bit of an opportunity to have a say in what they’d done. It felt like, since the very beginning, we were striving for clarity of how we fit into this – and any time it felt like we got a slice of the pie, it was a slice of a pie that disappeared before we got to the table.

And it crystalized why I was angry. I wasn’t angry about watches, either. I was angry because, as far as I could tell, some YC founder guy was messing with my friends and trying to push them around. I don’t really care about watches and watchfaces (though I can’t wait to tell you about the titanium Pebble 2 cases that Astosia and I have been working on… I’ve been wearing one for a few months and holy shit does it look fly). I care that my friends are respected, and that my friends have a little agency in a world that’s trying to steal a little bit more of it from us every single day.

In which I am grateful

This is, also, the really cool thing about Pebble. This is, actually, exactly what Eric built, back when this whole thing started.

These watches are our little expression of how we get agency in the world. Google and Apple and Meta have people whose entire jobs are to optimize metrics to get you to look at your screen more. The whole point of Pebble, from day 1, was that it got out of your way. The screen was on and you didn’t have to wait for it, it was waiting for you. Notifications meant that you did not have to pull your phone out of your pocket anymore – you could look down, see whether it was important, and then go back to doing whatever you were doing in the outside world. Pebble gave us agency. (Pebble gave me agency over a brain that would readily get lost in a phone any time I picked it up.)

Pebble started off with a developer platform. Apple thought that you should only get what they gave you on an iPhone; Pebble let you build beautiful things, constrained only by what the hardware could do. If you wanted to modify your world by knowing what the score of your favorite game was at a glance, Pebble would let you. If you wanted to have a live connection to your kid’s blood glucose monitor available at a glance all the time, there was a Pebble app to make that happen – you didn’t need Apple’s permission.

The community that came out of this, frankly, is incredible. The Pebble community is one of the kindest spaces I have ever been part of. There have been a lot of differences of opinion in the last few days. (Good! There should be!) The moderators have gently guided people to be kind to each other when things get touchy, and almost universally, people involved take it to heart.

But beyond that, one of the coolest things about the Pebble community is that the folks there take agency over their life in the bravest possible ways. I have seen more queer young people come through the Pebble community space than almost any other space I’ve been around. I like to imagine it is because these are the people who are learning to express themselves. The freedom and agency of the Pebble and Rebble world is just another form of that.

These are the people I have an enormous amount of respect for. The people behind Pebble who made that possible, I have a lot of respect for. These are people who cared – and care – about the world they were building. Eric is one of those people.

In which I think about the past

There has been a breakdown in this respect and trust somehow. It has been simmering, and then only now did it explode. I think we all did it a disservice by not addressing this head-on.

I’m by no means innocent here. I posted on Reddit with some of my complaints above about my DMs being dumped. /u/captionreader posted to ask, “[okay, you do not feel great at having those conversations posted, but] why is the tone of the Rebble post so inflammatory?”. Yeah, hey, that’s a good question! What the hell?

In part, I don’t think we really knew how to write something else. The Rebble team’s anger at being disrespected like this shined through, and after we saw what our logs and data could only show as scraping, we hit back hard. (I don’t think we were totally wrong to do so, given how everything had gone up until then, but right or wrong, it’s what we did.) But certainly going on the offensive like that was not exactly the most respectful way we could have handled this with Eric, either.

And the world has become so polarized, and we are lost in a microcosm of it. Absolutely everyone is at absolutely everyone else’s throat. There is an intense schism between two teams that I am vaguely adjacent to at work. It is very unpleasant to watch. And for God’s sake, while we were drafting the previous post, my country’s government had gotten so busy getting angry at each other about which order they were going to vote on a pair of bills in¹, that they had forgotten to give food to people who are hungry!

We were so busy arguing about who was going to serve which bytes that we each forgot to respect the humans that were going to make it happen. That includes me: I will unhesitatingly take responsibility for my part of pinning the sins of the entire VC-backed world onto Core, and onto Eric.

In which I think about the future

Here is the thing about this whole thing that I did not expect. I had sort of expected comments on Reddit to be really truly polarized. Once Eric’s post came out, I felt sort of ill not because of what it would mean for Rebble and/or Pebble, but because it seemed like people were going to be up in arms one way or the other. It’s not what I wanted.

And then something kind of magical happened. Even Hacker News managed to do what we couldn’t, and come up with what seemed like a middle ground. The conclusion specified seemed to be “both positions seem at least superficially understandable, hope you figure it out” (or, less charitably, “everyone involved seems like an asshole. good luck, suckas”). I wasn’t sure what to make of it because it didn’t fall into the black or white reality that I had set myself up for, but it seems like the roadmap of an answer.

It doesn’t make me any happier about things that got us here. But if there is a way forward, it is that we are in this together. We are going to have to figure out where we are each coming from, and spend a little extra effort doing what our politicians forgot how to: respecting each other. And then, I think it’ll be easy to figure out what we’re going to do about watches.

Nov 17, 2025 • by Team Rebble

Core Devices Keeps Taking Advantage Of Our Work

Edit (November 26th, 2am Pacific): This post was originally titled “Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our Work”. We’ve had a bit of time to reflect on this blog post, and we no longer agree with the characterization of Core Devices’ actions described around automated access to our App Store as “stealing”. We’re keeping the original text as-is to avoid confusion, but we’ve gone into more detail about why we’ve changed our stance on that in our follow-up blog post here.

This is a post that we don’t take any joy in writing. When we wrote last month about our agreement with Core Devices, we went into it believing that cooperation between Core and Rebble would be the best decision for the Pebble community. Core would spearhead the development of brand new watches, and we’d be there to provide our Rebble Web Services to go with them.

Unfortunately, our agreement is already breaking down. We hoped that by putting on a kind face, and publishing an optimistic-sounding blog post along with Eric, that we’d be able to collaborate in a way that met our responsibilities to you, our users. We knew that neither of us would be able to get all we wanted, but we thought we had enough common ground that we could serve Pebble users together.

Rebble has been working since the beginning to keep the Pebble experience alive – maintaining the App Store, building new services like Bobby, and running frontline support for people keeping their Pebbles ticking the whole time. (The Pebble App Store that Core offers right now is backed by Rebble!) But Eric and Core recently demanded that, instead of working together, we need to just give them all of our work from the last decade so that they could do whatever they want with it. And in Eric’s latest newsletter, he hasn’t told you the truth about where the work that makes his business run came from. We’d rather have cooperated with them to build something great together, but we’ve reached an impasse. So now, we’re asking you – our community – what to do with Core.

Update (November 18th, 7pm Pacific): Eric responded to this blog post. Obviously we don’t entirely agree with his position, and we don’t agree with how he has characterized our position – if we did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation! – but you should definitely read it too.

Edit (November 19th, 5pm Pacific): We added the words ‘collected by, maintained by, hosted by, and served by’ around ‘100%’ below to more accurately reflect our original intent.

How we got here

Nine years ago, Eric Migicovsky’s company, Pebble Technology Corporation, went out of business and dropped support for the hundreds of thousands of Pebble smartwatches out there. Rebble – and our community! – put together a Herculean effort to salvage the data that was left on the Pebble app store.

Since then, we built a replacement app store API that was compatible with the old app store front end. We built a storage backend for it, and then we spent enormous effort to import the data that we salvaged. We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around. So far, we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data. And the humans who run the Rebble servers have also spent incredibly late nights upgrading Kubernetes clusters, responding to outages, and generally keeping things ticking.

What you now know as the Pebble App Store from Eric’s new company, Core Devices, is the result of nearly a decade of our work. The data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% collected by, maintained by, hosted by, and served by Rebble. And the App Store that we’ve built together is much more than it was when Pebble stopped existing. We’ve patched hundreds of apps with Timeline and weather endpoint updates. We’ve curated removal requests from people who wanted to unpublish their apps. And it has new versions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we’ve run!

We’ve been negotiating with Eric for months now. We’ll compromise on almost everything else, but our one red line is this:

Whatever we agree on, there has to be a future for Rebble in there.

We want to give Core’s users access to the Rebble App Store. (We thought we agreed on that last month.) We’re happy to commit to maintaining the Web Services. We’d be happy to let them contribute and build new features. And what we want in return is simple: if we give Core access to our data, we want to make sure they’re not just going to build a walled garden app store around our hard work.

The problem is, Core won’t commit to this. Core wants unrestricted access to do whatever they want with the data that we archived and have spent the last years curating, maintaining servers for, and keeping relevant. If we gave Core the rights to use the App Store data however they want, they could build their own Core-private App Store, replace Rebble, and keep any new changes proprietary – leaving the community with nothing.

We’ve asked Eric about this every time we talk. He has occasionally said verbally that that isn’t their plan… but when it comes time to put it in writing, he has repeatedly refused to guarantee that. A week ago, we asked him to chat about this one more time – he delayed our conversation, and then in the intervening time, scraped our app store, in violation of the agreement that we reached with him previously.

What’s in an agreement?

We’re sad that the Rebble community has had tension with Core Devices ever since Google released the original PebbleOS source code. We’ve been pretty quiet about it for a while – we thought that we had a chance of working together if we tried hard not to fracture the community. But by now, a verbal promise isn’t enough.

When the code was released in January, we immediately branched the repository and started maintaining PebbleOS. The Rebble community began porting an open-source Bluetooth stack to PebbleOS, to support classic Pebble devices. Eric mentions this in his blog post, but what he doesn’t say is that Rebble paid for the work that he took as a base for his commercial watches!

Shortly after, Core forked PebbleOS¹ away from public maintainership. Back in June, they said that they would merge back periodically²; it’s now November, and we’re yet to see anything get merged back. Multiple efforts to contribute to PebbleOS were put on hold³ while we waited for Core to merge upstream. It never happened. Eric, in his blog post, now says that he will run PebbleOS as a “benevolent dictatorship”.

Rebble’s work is the backbone of Core in other ways. The Core Devices app is based on libpebble3; in Eric’s blog post, he said that Core built it. The reality is that it started life as libpebblecommon, which Rebblers wrote as part of our mobile app project (Cobble), and we funded through the Rebble Grants program. The work that we did together saved Core a month or two of engineering effort at the beginning; Core took Rebble’s work, added to it, and then paid us back by putting a more restrictive license on their contributions and wrapping a closed-source UI around it.

A few months ago, Core promised that they would let Rebble maintain and own the developer site, after Rebblers spent days making it build again, importing new content, etc. Then, in Eric’s original proposed agreement, he demanded not only that Core publish the developer site on their domain, but that we remove our copy of the developer site and redirect to theirs.

These have been blows to our community, to be sure. We’ve tried not to let this affect our negotiations: we want to work together. But we went into this wary, knowing what a promise from Core meant.

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.

What’s at stake?

Rebble’s goal is to have a community-driven place to develop for these watches that we all love – today, and also in the future, if (love forbid!) something were to happen to Core Devices.

If we gave Eric an unrestricted license to our data, he could do the same thing he did to our firmware work, and our mobile app work. He’d have the right to take it and build his own app store – and the work that we’ve done together as a community for the past decade would no longer be in our control.

We watched this happen ten years ago when Pebble went under (Rebble has been around longer than Pebble and Core combined by now!). We don’t know that Core can commit to supporting this ecosystem in the long term. After all, the warranty on Pebble 2 Duo is 30 days long, and early users are already reporting that their buttons are falling apart!

But even if Eric has the best intentions now and can find the funds to keep Core afloat, you could imagine that OpenAI, or someone else, would want to acquire Core and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. We’ve watched this play out so many times, from so many other companies, in the decade since – a product we love gets released, and then gets killed off, another victim of closed-source enshittification for profit. We love these watches, and we’d be sad if that happened. And more to the point, we love this community that we’ve been a hub for.

This is your choice

In our last post, we said that Rebble belongs to you. We mean it. These are the apps that you’ve written and contributed to your fellow Pebblers. These are the watches that you spent so long caring about and loving. This is your community, where you make awesome happen. So we see two directions from here, and we need the community’s help to decide.

1. If y’all would like, one option is that we could aggressively protect the work we’ve done, and try to protect the community going forward. If Eric had the foresight to back up this data nine years ago and maintain it himself, there’s nothing we could say about this. But he didn’t, and we, together, did. We made it absolutely clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of the Rebble Web Services.

   This gets ugly in a hurry, but we have legal resources that can protect us. We’d rather spend our time on building a next-generation open source mobile app than spend it on a fight, but if it’s what we have to do, we’re not afraid. If we want to keep what we built, we’re going to have to use our energy to protect it.

2. The other option is that we could just let Eric do whatever he wants. Eric believes that our database should be free for anyone to make their own copy of, because we are a non-profit Foundation. We don’t agree, but maybe you do! Nothing has to live forever, and we’ve done great work together. If the community prefers that we pass the mantle onwards, we’ll do what y’all think is right.

These are both painful options for us. And to be clear, we’d rather do neither! If Eric and Core are willing to give us a legal commitment that they’re not just going to kick us out, and that they’ll work with us, we’d much rather do that. We’re happy to let them build whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt Rebble. Eric, you’re the best in the world at making quirky hardware for people who genuinely love what they wear. We’re great at building a community. Use our locker, use our timeline, use our App Store – we’ve built it just for you. Just as long as we can work together as partners.

But in the mean time, we’re here at a crossroads.

We need you

For our friends who have supported us over the past years: we’re sorry that you’re caught in the middle of this. We think Rebble can be the hub of community, and Core can make awesome products, and these don’t have to be in conflict. Eric’s new devices, Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2, look absolutely amazing! We want to support him in making beautiful hardware long into the future – without exposing our users to the classic walled garden enshittification trap.

But we want your input. If Eric and Core can’t play nice, we need you, our community, to tell us what to do. We’re serious: if you think we should do something different, we will. So we’re posting this on Reddit /r/pebble and a handful of other places. We’ll be (gulp!) reading the comments – the top rated and the long tail – to try to understand what the community’s sentiment is. We’ll be watching the discussion on Discord. And, of course, if you want, you can e-mail the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors directly. We’d like to hear from you.

Yours in hope – so many of us from the Rebble team over the past 9 years, including: David, Joshua, Will, Ruby, Stasia (LCP), Siân (astosia), Harrison (Link Sky), Lavender, Ben, Ephraim (gibbiemonster), Jakob (Jackie)