Nov 17, 2025 • by Team Rebble

Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our Work

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)

Oct 9, 2025 • by David, Joshua, and Will

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 technologies¹. 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!

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

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