Mar 24, 2025 • by Katharine Berry

Introducing Bobby, our new Pebble assistant

I’m excited to announce a new Rebble service for our paying Rebble subscribers: Bobby, a voice assistant app for your Pebble!

Bobby is available from the Rebble Appstore now! You can also check out its webpage.

Bobby is a new voice assistant for your Pebble. It’s inspired by Snowy, but powered by modern AI technology (specifically, Google’s Gemini LLM). This makes Bobby both easier to use and more powerful than Snowy: no longer do you need to phrase your requests exactly.

Features

Weather

You can ask Bobby for the weather!

Timers

Bobby can set timers for you!

You can even have multiple timers at once, with different names!

Alarms

Bobby can do alarms, too!

As with timers, you can have multiple alarms set at once, and you can name them individually if you like.

Reminders

Bobby can remind you to do something in the future by putting a pin on your Pebble’s timeline (as well as keeping a list in the app).

Calculations and Conversions

Need some numbers numbered? Bobby can help with that!

Trivia

Bobby can answer many different types of question:

Bobby doesn’t have a knowledge cutoff date - in most cases, Bobby can look up current information to a answer your questions.

Feedback

Bobby is a new project, and we’re excited to hear what you think! If you have any feedback, please let us know. You can contact us on Discord, or directly through the app. The app gives you three ways to send feedback:

• From the main menu you can dictate feedback at any time
• From the conversation view, you can long-press to bring up a menu with a “Report” option to respond bad responses
• You can ask Bobby to send feedback to the developers (or any similar wording) - it’ll send feedback automatically

We’d love to hear what you think, how Bobby works for you, and any suggestions you have for improvements or new features!

Compatibility

Bobby is currently available for Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel, and Pebble 2. Bobby will presumably also work on the upcoming Core 2 Duo and Core Time 2, but we’ll find that out in the future. Maybe Bobby will even gain the (optional!) ability to speak aloud!

The Pebble Time Round is not supported (but may be in the future - especially if there is demand!). The original Pebble and Pebble Steel don’t have microphones, so cannot be supported.

Bobby also currently does not support Cobble, Rebble’s work-in-progress replacement for the Pebble mobile app. Please don’t try to use it - bugs in Cobble cause many features of Bobby to misbehave. For the time being, Bobby works best with the official Pebble mobile apps.

Bonus: a dictation update for Pebble!

Alongside the launch of Bobby, we are introducing an experimental new feature for all Pebble dictation: you can now set your language to auto in the Pebble app’s voice language settings. This enables you to switch between dictation languages on the fly without needing to change settings all the time - handy for the multilingual among you! We also expect that dictation accuracy should be improved across the board.

Do note that, for short utterances (only a syllable or two), the “auto” setting may guess the wrong language. If you can’t see “auto” in your language list yet, it should show up eventually - or you can rerun boot to speed it along. As always, dictation requires a Rebble subscription.

We also now have a way to hear what your watch microphone sounds like, if you’re curious (or having problems) - if you have a Rebble subscription, turn on Audio Debug Mode on your account page and then visit the Audio Debug page to see your recorded audio. Audio debug mode will automatically turn off after 24 hours, and the recordings are deleted 24 hours after they’re taken. When audio debug mode is disabled (as it is by default), Rebble does not store either recordings or transcripts of your dictation requests.

Privacy

Every request you make to Bobby is passed to us, and then passed on to Google (twice, actually - first for speech recognition, and then for the LLM). Additional details are passed to other parties for certain requests.

We don’t store your requests long-term - they are deleted after a short period of time, currently ten minutes. We use the versions of Google’s APIs that do not store your data for training, and we don’t pass them any unique identifiers for you. Similarly, for other APIs, no context is provided as to who is making the request, and all requests are made via our servers.

There is an exception to this: if you report a thread (either from the long-press menu in the conversation view, or by asking Bobby to send feedback to us), that conversation will be stored and made available to the Rebble team for review.

Pricing

Bobby is included as part of your Rebble subscription! Why isn’t it free? Two reasons:

• You need to be a Rebble subscriber for dictation to work, and Bobby isn’t very useful without that
• Bobby uses a number of expensive APIs (for the LLM, weather, geolocation, POIs, etc.), which cost us money on each use.

Bobby imposes a monthly limit on usage to ensure a single user can’t force us to run up a huge bill. We don’t expect most users to hit this, but you can see how close you are to your monthly limit in the “Quota” screen in Bobby’s menu (hit ⋯ on the main screen to get there).

Jan 27, 2025 • by Will Murphy

The future of Rebble

Today we’re excited to announce several developments which will affect the future of Rebble. Let’s get straight into it, starting with the big one…

🎉 Google Open Sources Tintin

Today Google announced that they have released the source code to PebbleOS. This is massive for Rebble, and will accelerate our efforts to produce new hardware.

Previously, we have been working on our own replacement firmware: RebbleOS. As you can see by the commit history though, progress was slow. Building a production-ready realtime OS for the Pebble is no small feat, and although we were confident we’d get there given enough time, it was never our ideal path. Thanks to the hard work of many people both within Google and not, we finally have our hands on the original source code for PebbleOS. You can read Google’s blog post on this for even more information.

This does not mean we instantly have the ability to start developing updates for PebbleOS though, we first will need to spend some concentrated time getting it to build. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about Rebble itself.

⌚ Rebble’s Community Future

With a long term plan for the Rebble community starting to coalesce, the longevity of Rebble is more important than ever. We’re excited to say that Rebble is transforming into a non-profit to formalize what we’ve all always hoped for: the community (that’s you!) are the owners of Rebble! Rebble has always been about preserving these humble little smartwatches as a little oasis of user-respectful technology in a desert of big corporations trying to sell your attention, and we’re excited to have a legal framework that lets us codify our missions of: educating people about why these are important; using them as a platform to teach embedded systems; preserving the history of this quirky little platform; and building open source software for the public good to keep the dream going long into the future.

It’s still early days, but more information will be available at rebble.foundation as soon as we have it. In the mean time, expect more hackathons from us, now that we have a framework to run them! Oh, and speaking of which…

💻 The RebbleOS Hackathon

The last Rebble hackathon was so much fun, and we’ve been wanting to do another for some time. The Rebble project is a fantastic example of what community can achieve, and we intend to build on this in 2025 and beyond.

Writing Pebble apps is a fantastic way to delve into the world of embedded systems, and what better way to do that than with a hackathon?

Mark your calendars for the 1st - 8th of March as we work on RebbleOS and other apps, and encourage you to do the same!

For more information see /hackathon-002

🐶 Old Dog, New Tricks

We’re also happy to announce that we’ve acquired the source code for Snowy! Snowy was one of the most popular assistants for the Pebble, and is still a useful companion today. However, given the current landscape of LLMs and voice assistants it is definitely due an upgrade, so expect to see this old dog appear in the hackathon.

🗒️ That’s all for now

Between everything above, and the fact that progress continues on our replacement mobile app, the future of Rebble has never looked so bright. We are committed to an open-source community-owned smartwatch, and these announcements bring that reality even closer. A huge thank you to everyone in the Pebble-verse who made this happen, especially those internal to Google who have helped ensure PebbleOS’s future. We’d like to especially thank Liam McLoughlin and Matthieu Jeanson, as well as Rebble superstar Katharine Berry. Thank you also to the many other Googlers who made this possible – and a massive shout out to Eric Migicovsky for ensuring this happened (and for creating Pebble in the first place).

One more shoutout: we would like to thank, of course, you! Without all of you Rebblers who have been entrusting us for the past 8 years to keep the dream of an open-platform user-respectful smartwatch alive, PebbleOS wouldn’t be relevant at all today. Your cumulative $3s a month have reminded the world that Pebble is worth preserving, and worth building on. We love this platform, and we’re glad that you do too. Thank you so much.

Stay tuned for more updates as the Hackathon launches, and when we have the first working versions of the new RebbleOS!

- Will ❤️

Clarifications:

How can I get involved with the hackathon?

See here.

Did Google gift PebbleOS to Rebble specifically?

No, Google have open sourced the PebbleOS to everyone, Rebble plans to make good use of this.

Is this related to <Other Project>?

No. If you’re reading about another PebbleOS project somewhere other than this blog, it does not involve us.

What if I have more questions?

Reach out to us at support@rebble.io, or drop a message on Discord.

May 12, 2023 • by Will Murphy

A look back at the Rebble hackathon

At the tail end of 2022, we ran our first ever hackathon. It was initially posed as a bit of an experiment — we know roughly how many Rebble users there are, but developing for the Pebble smartwatch has become a little trickier over the years since the shutdown of CloudPebble. In the end, however, it was a fantastic weekend of likeminded hackers building new apps and watchfaces for the smartwatch platform the community stubbornly refuses to let die.

In this post I’d like to recap the weekend, talk about the awesome submissions and prize winners, and thank the team that made this possible.

The event

We were very open from the start that this was a bit of an experiment — mainly because we were a little worried that it might be announced as a big event, and then only two people would show up! We put together an outline of a plan on a dedicated hackathon page, included it in a blog post, and built a VM for easier development. Then it was simply a matter of waiting for the countdown to hit zero.

You’ll notice we named the first event Hackathon #001, the triple digits reflecting our hope that this was the first of many community hackathons. This would of course hinge on more than one person showing up.

Word spread on Twitter, Reddit, and even on Make:, and then, on the 18th of November, we launched the event!

Liftoff 🚀

Some users were really excited for a weekend of hacking away on their favourite smartwatch platform; others used it as an excuse to develop their first app or watchface.

The timer hit zero, the little animation I built (using icons made by our talented @Lav) launched into space, and the event was live! On our Discord server, we opened up some new channels where people could chat with one another, as well as a forum channel where each hackathon project could get its own discussion area. They filled up fast!

It was so exciting to see new projects appearing throughout the weekend. Every couple of hours another few posts would appear. Any project completed during the weekend would receive stickers, and we’d also announced mystery prize(s) for our favourite apps, so there was a real buzz around the event. Some users hacked away at projects all weekend long (we do hope you went outside at some point), others worked on projects in the few free hours they had. Shout out to John Spahr who waited until the second the hackathon launched to submit their app and make sure they got at least one submission in!

Day 1 done 📅

After the first day of hacking 48 people had worked on their Pebble apps, 6 of which were already live on the store!

The rest of the weekend saw app after app, watchface after watchface uploaded to the store. People discussed ideas and tips on Discord, and a few participants even dared to join the voice chat. Before we knew it Sunday evening had arrived, and brought with it the end of our first ever hackathon.

The event was quite a lot of effort to co-ordinate, and as we later discovered, the trickiest part was to come (sending stickers and prizes all over the world is no simple task). It was completely worth it, however, to see so many in the community come out and join in. We had over 50 people working on projects, and many more Rebblers were on the Discord server encouraging, giving feedback or advice, and generally making it a great event. When you consider how niche an event this was, 50 participants blew me away!

Thank you to everyone involved, and we hope to see you again for Hackathon #002!

The ✨ Awesome ✨ submissions

There was no mandate given for this Hackathon, “Create something cool” was about the extent of it. Some people wanted to build apps, others put their design hats on and built watchfaces.

Every user who submitted something was eligible to get some neat Rebble stickers, but to make things more interesting we promised prizes to the best submissions, and based on what was submitted, decided on prizes for ‘best watchface’, ‘best tool’ and ‘best game’. Runners-up would also get prizes.

So let’s look at some of the awesome new things created by the community, as well as the winners!

Watchfaces ⌚

Custom watchfaces are what made Pebble so great back in the day, and even outside the hackathon we see a steady stream of new faces uploaded through our developer portal to our appstore. During the hackathon, 14 new faces were uploaded, with some users even taking the time to make fancy appstore banners or animated screenshot for their store listing.

This blog post is long enough already, so I won’t go into detail for every watchface here. But you should check them all out on the appstore! From top-left to bottom-right they are:

• Turbo by Antaxiom
• Pixel by Nikki
• Copland by Difegue
• pRebble by irek
• Electric by Stefan Bauwens
• Revolved by Gonzalo Muñoz
• Alienware by Astosia
• Time Twist Pop by Dook
• Bloch Sphere by thyung
• Minimalin Reborn by vorsk
• TrekXmas by sethasaurus
• Alpine Wonderland by Kiwiscripter
• Weezeface by John Spahr
• KemoPebble by CosmicTacoCat

Each one of these watchfaces was made with love by an awesome member of our community, so thanks once more for helping keep our Pebbles alive!

Runner Up: Best Watchface

This category was tricky, but after much deliberation the runner up for Best Watchface went to Electric by Stefan Bauwens:

Electric is a really neat watchface that displays the time and date on a nice graphic of a PCB. On the bottom left is what looks like an LED array. To make things even more impressive, you can pick what’s displayed on this LED array and even automate it through tasker! It’s a really nice touch to an already impressive looking watchface.

Like all runners up & winners, Stefan received a fresh, boxed up Pebble watched signed by Eric Migicovsky!

🏆 Winner: Best Watchface

The winner for best watchface was Pixel by Nikki Murello! Pixel is an extensively customisable watchface that we felt captured people’s love of the Pebble platform.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a watchface, and please know that picking two winners was so hard — all the submissions were fantastic!

Watch apps

We decided to break the watch apps category in half for picking winners: Tools and Games. We received a wide number of tools, but before we get to the winners, let’s look at all the watch apps across both categories that were submitted!

The quality of apps submitted during the hackathon blew me away. Watchapps can be tricky to make, and take a lot of time; it cannot be overstated just how impressive all the submissions were. From top-left to bottom-right the submissions are:

• Services for Pebble by Blockarchitech - Manage your planning center services on your wrist

• Activites by John Spahr - Uses the bored API to suggest activities for you to do

• Perihelion by Thomas Stoeckert - Displays information about upcoming rocket launches

• Home Assistant by Will Murphy - A full-featured Home Assistant control for Pebble

• City Buddy by João Luís - A navigation tool using Citymapper data

• Find-o-matic by Kennedn - A compass that points to whatever you want using the DuckDuckGo nearest places API

• Rock! The Vote by Stanivision Inc - Everyone gets asked to vote on new fun question each day

• Sports by Andy Burris - A nice sports app for Pebble

• Friq by Matthew Hungerford - A physics based game

• Stocks by itsthered1 - A stock watchlist for Pebble

• Red Blue Red! by Javier Rizzo - A casual and addictive Pebble game

• Stepper by sethasaurus - A step counting app for all Pebbles

• Searching Emery by Helco - A mind blowing 3d game for Pebble

• BilBikes 2.0 by Israel Ortiz de Zárate - A Pebble app for Bibao’s bike service

Runner Up: Best Tool

The runner up for Best Tool was Bilbikes 2.0! Pebbles were born out of an idea around cycle computers, and it was great to see a community focused app created around cycling in 2022.

Thanks to Israel for their efforts, and we hope they enjoy their prize:

🏆 Winner: Best Tool

The winner of the Best Tool category was City Buddy by João Luís! It’s a great little navigation app with custom icons that capture the Pebble spirit.

The Pebble iconography was one of the things that gave the whole UX a very cutesy feel. Any app that creates new icons in this style is a great addition to the appstore!

Runner Up: Best Game

All the games submitted were fantastic, and I play most of them whenever I have a few minutes to kill.

The runner up for best game was Searching Emery by Helco. This game, which is centered around searching for the Pebble model that never was is a mind blowing demonstration of what you can achieve with the Pebble hardware. The doom-esque game is played sideways, and is super impressive. Definitely check it out on the appstore today!

🏆 Winner: Best Game

Last but certainly not least is our winner for Best Game: FRIQ by Matthew Hungerford! FRIQ is a seemingly simple physics-based game involving firing 2d balls on screen, but it’s deceptively tricky and very addictive!

And that is the last of our winners! Congratulations to everyone who received a prize — we hope you really enjoy the small token of our appreciation! ❤️

Did someone say stickers? 🥳

Everyone who took part in the hackathon is eligible to receive stickers. We did have some issues getting these sent out, so some of you might not have received them yet, but as of this week they are all in the post at the very least! If you have any concerns about your sticker shipment, email me at will@rebble.io and we’ll make sure they get to you!

🧡🧡 Thank You 🧡🧡

Thank you to everyone who took part and continues to be a part of this amazing community. Rebble couldn’t do it without you.

We also couldn’t do it without our amazing team of volunteers across the planet. So thanks to:

• Joshua for making sure that all the stickers and prizes get to their rightful owners!
• SwanSwanSwanSwanSoSoft for providing Rebble with the pristine quality Pebbles to use as prizes.
• IshOtJr for getting the stickers made up (and getting our friends at Make: Magazine to continue to notice us).
• Katharine Berry for helping write the thank you notes (and making sure the lights stay on at Rebble).
• Lav for her awesome hackathon icons 🚀
• Eric for taking the time to sign our prizes!
• All the other Rebblers who added their ideas to the mix and help make Rebble what it is!

The end

I hope this post doesn’t take as long to read as it did to write. Hackathon #001 was a huge success and will definitely be followed up by Hackathon #002, so keep an eye out here on rebble.io or on Discord for future updates. You can also use the Discord #releases channel to see every new app, watchface and update to hit the appstore. Thanks for making it this far, catch you all at the next Hackathon!

- Will <3

Nov 2, 2022 • by Will Murphy

Hackathon, App Updates & More

Time flies when you’re having fun. It’s been a year since our last blog post announcing the launch of the Rebble developer portal and in that time we’ve seen a whole host of new apps and watchfaces submitted to the appstore. Rebble continues to have an amazing community behind it, so in this blog post we’re going to take a look at a few highlights from the last year and announce our first hackathon. But first, how many of us actually are there…?

The Rebble Alliance

One question we’ve always been interested to know the answer to is “how many Rebble users are there?”. Rebble web services logs give a rough estimate, but we’ve never known for sure. A few months ago we deployed an update to RWS that listens for the analytics data the Pebble app sends home. We only store the non-personal information from it, but that’s enough for us to see the result: over 24,000 Rebble users!!

Now, this number should be taken with a pinch of salt as some of these pings will be from users with the Rebble’d Pebble app installed who are not actively using their Pebbles still, but if we just look at pings from devices with watches connected we get a healthy 16,000 Rebbles! It’s unsurprising that these days the majority of our users are on Android, due to the fact that the app can still be side-loaded easily unlike on iOS.

It really is amazing to see so many people out there still using Pebbles. Thank you to everyone who continues to be part of the Rebble community. Now, speaking of the Android app…

The Android app gets an update

Fitbit absorbed Pebble. Google absorbed Fitbit. Despite the Pebble app being a double hand-me-down, we recently saw the Android app get its first update in 4 years! This update changes the Pebble app to be 64-bit, which means it can be installed on the Pixel 7 - the first Android phone to ship with this hard requirement. You can download the app here. The app update has also improved the reliability of caller ID.

A massive thank you to Google for putting the effort in to support an app so old it isn’t even hosted on their own app store!

You can read more about this at any of the following links:

• Ars Technica
• XDA
• Gadgets & Wearables
• Reddit

Announcing our first Hackathon!

Now for the really exciting part: we’re thrilled to announce that we’re running our first hackathon on the 18-20th of November. We’re hoping it’s the first of many too, hence the optimistic 3-digit name! It’s a bit of an experiment on our part, but the idea is that anyone who wants to take part simply fills out the form, sets up their dev environment, and joins in on that weekend by building a fun watchface, watchapp, or tool for the Pebble watch.

Everyone who uploads an app to the appstore during the hackathon will receive free Rebble stickers, and our favourite submission(s) will receive a special prize (likely to be a shiny pebble watch).

For more information and live updates, check out the dedicated hackathon page. For even livelier updates be sure to follow us on Twitter. During the hackathon weekend we’ll have dedicated channels on Discord too.

A few more things

Here are a few more minor updates from the smartwatch community that refuses to move on…

#buy-sell-trade

Following Discord’s launch of a more mature forum system, we now have a buy/sell/trade channel on the Rebble Discord Server. This is a great place to let people know of any good deals, find an old watch a new home, or buy another Pebble (to go with your other 10).

#releases

We also recently added another new channel: #releases. This channel is read-only, and updates whenever a developer adds or updates a new app or watchface on the appstore.

Emoji Replacement Project

Some Rebble users are working on a project that uses Pebble language packs to add support for more modern emojis. It’s a fun project that anyone can contribute to. Check out the GitHub page if you’re interesting in helping out.

So there it is, a few updates from the ever-active world of Rebble. To keep up to date we recommend joining the Discord server, where there are literally dozens of us. And if you really want to get involved, here’s the link to the hackathon page once again!

Oct 24, 2021 • by Will Murphy

An all new developer experience

Hi 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.

To get started, head over to dev-portal.rebble.io. If you migrated your pebble account back in 2018, you should see your watchfaces and apps as soon as you log in. If you didn’t migrate your account, you’ll need to follow the steps to link your newer Rebble account with your original developer ID.

Once you’re logged in you’ll see a list of your watchfaces and apps. You can upload new releases, change appstore listing information, manage screenshots and more!

Uploading new apps and faces is easy too, just press the ‘new app’ button on the left hand side to go through the upload process.

We’re lucky enough to still see a decent number of people developing for the Pebble smartwatch, which is a testament to the development process and the Rebble community. Hopefully this new tool will enable existing developers to get their apps and updates out faster, and perhaps even entice new developers.

Check it out at dev-portal.rebble.io. If you need assistance, check out the help centre at help.rebble.io or ask a question on Discord.