image/svg+xml Rebble · Blog

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:

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:

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:

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.

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!

The app began as a discussion on the Rebble Discord server:

“I had the idea to make an app that made sideloading .pbws easier, since that functionality was broken in the original Pebble app.” says Lavender Glaab, one half of the dynamic duo behind the project. “Alice Grey had it working an hour later, and we had a Play Store page within 24 hours. It was really cool to see this app come to life thanks to her programming skill, and I think it’ll be a useful tool for anybody who uses their Pebble on Android.”

In addition to sideloading .pbw (watchface/watchapp), .pbl (language), and .pbz (firmware) files, the app also handles Rebble appstore links — in fact it will even translate legacy Pebble appstore links, providing users have Rebble Web Services set up. Finally, the app will facilitate the eventual transition to Rebble’s own in-development mobile app.

While the developers have achieved their initial goal of making sideloading easier on modern Android devices, there’s still more to do. One particular goal is localization — the process of adapting the app to work with different spoken languages — which is actually something the team could use help with! If you would like to contribute translations, or even just let us know what languages you’d like to see support for, please get in touch via our Sideload Helper localization issue on GitHub.

The particularly observant Pebbler may have noticed a fun little easter egg in the app ID (visible in the Goole Play URL): the name Charon in io.rebble.charon refers to the mythological ferrier of souls from the world of the living to the world of the dead — just like Sideload Helper by Rebble ferries files into the undead Pebble APK that still gives life to all of our watches! :grinning:

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!