Apr 13, 2020 • by Will Murphy

Squeezing the most out of your Pebble

Hi there! It’s Will here (some of you may know me as @Will0 on Discord). In the ~6 months since our last blog post a lot has happened, both in the Pebbleverse and the real world. Yet, despite the ever-increasing gap between the Pebble shutdown and today, still new people are signing up with Rebble to bring their beloved smartwatch back to life!

On that note, there have been a number of similar questions over the last few months on Reddit and the Rebble Discord, such as ‘why do I need to use RWS’, ‘I’m struggling to get setup’, ‘What are the best apps to use in 2020?’.

In this post we’ll go over the answer to all of these, as well as cover how you can squeeze the most out of your Pebble in 2020.

Let’s start with the easy questions first…

What is RWS / Why do I need it?

RWS stands for Rebble Web Services, and is what most people mean when they say ‘Rebble’ (though Rebble encompasses more than RWS, I’ll get to that later). RWS replaces the old Pebble servers, but does not replace the app - instead, during setup, you’re telling the original Pebble app to point to Rebble servers. Without RWS you’ll have to sideload Pebble apps, and won’t get any of the other server-dependent functions. RWS provides two tiers: Free and Paid. Here’s what you get with each:

Free Tier:

Access to the Rebble appstore
Timeline Server Support (3 hour sync period)

Paid Tier:

Access to the Rebble app store
Timeline Server Support (30 minute sync period)
Voice Dictation (note that iOS SMS reply doesn’t work)
Weather API (For the system weather app and timeline pins, watchfaces do not need this as they handle it themselves)
You fund the free tier and other Rebble work

How do I get setup with RWS?

Follow the guide at rebble.io/howto. Do not use any ‘Rebble’ apps from the appstore, as they aren’t legitimate and probably don’t work. If you run into any issues, check the ‘common issues’ section under the howto, or ask in #rebble-help on Discord.

What doesn’t work anymore?

Since the Pebble shutdown in 2016 some small features don’t work anymore, namely:

Timeline based apps that use ‘topics’, which allow lots of users to subscribe to a single source of timeline pins. But this is a small percentage of timeline apps, the rest still work. Note that your calendar pins are special, and do not require the timeline server to work.
Reply to SMS on iOS - Pebble used clever carrier-specific workarounds for iOS’ locked down SMS behaviour in a way that Rebble can’t easily replicate.
Apps that rely on servers no longer available - Some apps serve their settings page from web servers, and if those servers don’t exist anymore you can’t setup the apps. It’s not always a total loss though.

So what can I do with my Pebble in 2020?

The sky is the limit! Most of the apps and watchfaces on the appstore still work, and more are still being published - Like swanswanswanswansosoft’s Covid-19 tracker.

Apps

Here are some great apps that still work and are useful daily:

App	Description	Platform
Checklist	A checklist of items, for shopping etc.	Both
Timer+	Pretty, animated timer	Both
Alarmist	Set phone alarms from your watch	Android
Dashboard	Control your phone from your Pebble	Android
Dialer for Pebble	Better call integration	Android
Skunk	Store and view barcodes (for reward cards etc.)	Both
RSS Reader	Browse and read RSS feeds	Both
Snowy ($2.99)	Voice assistant for Pebble	Both

… some other personal favourites …

App	Description	Requires Voice	Platform
HTTP Push	Make HTTP Calls (useful for home automation)	No	Both
News Headlines	View BBC News Headlines	No	Both
Solanum	A pomodoro timer to help you focus	No	Both
Music Boss	A better music app	No	Android
Piny Wings	A fun little game	No	Both
Pebtris	You’ll have to hum your own theme music	No	Both

..and some that have been released only recently:

App	Description
Hand wash timer	Make sure you wash your hands for long enough!
2019-Ncov	Track the number of Covid-19 cases around you
RSS Reader	Read the title and contents of your favourite RSS feeds
Hybrid Watchface	A minimalistic watchace for Pebble Time and later
Sheikah Slate Watchface	The power of the sheikah slate on your wrist!

Timeline

June last year Rebble implemented timeline support. Which means you can once again push news, data, stocks, events and more to your timeline. It’s a convenient way to get information you can about available quickly but unobtrusively. As some you already know, I wrote a service that lets you hook anything from If-This-Then-That to Pebble timeline, making it easy to push data.

As an example, I push the following data to my timeline:

Data	Method
BBC Breaking News	IFTTT: New Tweet to Timeline
New post to /r/Pebble	IFTTT: Reddit to Timeline
New RSS feed	IFTTT: RSS Feed applet to Timeline
NASA Breaking News alerts	IFTTT: NASA to Timeline
Monzo Debit card payments	Timeline Bounce Server
New Hot item on hacker news	IFTTT: Hacker News to Timeline

This keeps my timeline full of interesting stuff to read when I choose to. Only BBC breaking news creates a notification, the rest is passive and I either read it when it pops up in timeline peek or when I scroll back through timeline past (By mapping the ‘up’ quicklaunch to timeline past)

To get going with timeline you’ll need this app to generate a ‘token’ and to follow this guide or - if you prefer pictures - this guide. It helps if you’re familiar with If-This-Then-That too.

Developing New Apps

Do you know how to program in C or JavaScript? Maybe you want to learn? Developing on the Pebble is super fun and between the #app-dev channel on the Discord and the documentation there’s plenty of support still.

To get started you’ll need the SDK. For which there are now a few options:

Once you’ve got an app or a watchface you’d like to publish, you can do so through the new Rebble developer portal. This developer portal is a work in progress, but the basics are there now. Watch this space!

Some other neat tips

Here are a couple of neat Pebble tips that I’ve seen recently, that maybe you didn’t already know:

When you start playing music on your phone, the stock music app will move to the top of your app list on your watch, making it easy to open by pressing select twice from your watchface
Holding back from a notification will toggle quiet time
Enabling ‘Stand-By Mode’ from Settings -> System on your watch will disable Bluetooth when your Pebble doesn’t move for 30 minutes, saving battery power

Darksky API Shutdown

You might also have seen recently that Apple have purchased Darksky, one of the most popular weather API providers for Pebble apps and faces. Apple are going to shut down the API June 2021, and have already stopped issuing new API keys. Whilst this won’t affect the Rebble weather service, watchfaces that require this API will no longer work properly from June 2021. There’s plenty of time to come up with a replacement solution though, so I’m hopeful.

What else are Rebble up to?

Work continues in the background by our trusty band of volunteers, which can be followed on Github and Discord.

RebbleOS (the replacement firmware) continues to get frequent updates, with automated testing being a recent addition, as well as loading apps over bluetooth! Check out #firmware for more.
The RWS infrastructure has seen some upgrades recently, moving some services to Google Cloud and integrating operational analytics and observability tooling to make finding and fixing errors and choke points easier.
RWS Bugfixes! - For those of you on iOS, a fix was recently deployed that resolves the locker sync issue some of you were experiencing. If this has affected you, check out this Reddit post. You’ll also notice that the ‘see all’ buttons that mysteriously disappeared from the appstore are back for good now.
Work on the developer portal has begun, to make submitting new apps easier.
There’s even some work on a replacement mobile app, though this is a huge piece of work likely to take time.

So there you have it, the answer to some of the more commonly asked questions and hopefully a demonstration of just how much functionality you can get with a few apps and some timeline trickery! At some point I’d like to do a blog post of my Pebble workflow, and all the cool things I use it for, so watch 😉 this space.

Finally, if you have a question that wasn’t covered in this post, check the Common Issues section or stop by #rebble-help on Discord. If there’s one thing the Pebble community isn’t short on, it’s people willing to help!

Nov 2, 2019 • by Ish Ot Jr.

Rebble, Rebble Everywhere!

…and now a blog to link (?!)

It seems almost beyond belief that nearly three years have passed since Pebble ceased operations and early members of the Rebble Alliance announced our intention to create a new hope! And while so much has happened during this time, it feels almost like we’re back where we started with the news that Fitbit, who rescued portions of Pebble from the ashes, are themselves being acquired by Google! But this isn’t the only recent wearables headline of note: Rebble has been in the news numerous times of late!

Wareable

Our perennial publishing pals at Wearable can always be counted on for coverage and were the first to report on our re-opening of appstore submissions!

iFixit

Kevin Purdy interviewed Katharine, Joshua, myself (ishotjr) and others for an absolutely fantastic piece on the history of Pebble (see also my Thingscon Salon talk, which I provided to help with background/research), the rise of Rebble from Pebble’s “rubble” , and the plethora of hacks being used to keep Pebbles alive now and in the future. One of the best articles I have ever read on the subject, and a catalyst for countless outpourings from Pebblers past and present, as well as reblogging all over the world!

Motherboard (VICE)

It seems the force was working its way across the entire blogosphere, since right on the heels of the iFixit interviews, Jared Newman reached out to the Pebble community, hoping to derive the source of our enduring enamourment with these elite exemplars of horology. The result was a rollicking recap of the rise of Rebble, from the day I registered the domain right up to the first new appstore submission!

The Extra Dimension (The Nexus)

And because omne trium perfectum - as I’m sure we have all uttered frequently - a third interview that week from podcasting pro Ian Buck at The Nexus’s The Extra Dimension yielded an auditory exploration of the environmental impact of product perservation projects like Rebble!

Hi, Hello, Help!

Hopefully all of these press pixels have meant even more Pebble-y people have peeped our project - so now seems like a good time to say not only “Hi!” but also…“Help!”. As each of these fantastic pieces of journalism mention, there are many challenges we face in attempting to keep (the STM32 oscillator in…) our beloved smartwatches ticking - and while we’ve many dedicated developers and sympathetic support specialists, we can always use more help with our myriad efforts! I’d intended to do an entire blog post detailing our projects, their status, and opportunities to contribute, but in order to capitalize on our current celebrity, wanted to include a brief request here: if you’re interested in helping with firmware, back end, appstore - or perhaps most urgent of all, given the uncertainty of our friends at Fitbits’ ability to help keep the originals online post-acquisition, replacement Android and iOS app - development please look for ishotjr#4319 on our Discord server, or send me a Tweet if that’s more your cup of .

Sep 30, 2019 • by Joshua Wise

Appy New Year!

Hi again! It’s a new year, in an old house, with more technology I’ll never understand. But amidst all the chaos of the seasons changing, AWS being unfathomable to me, and Alexx Reed being about 50% smarter of a lyricist than I’ll ever understand all the references to, I have exciting news, and that is: for the first time in over a year, there is a brand new app for Pebbles in a Pebble app store!

If you’ve been following along on Reddit or on Discord (shoutouts to our loyal fans!), you might have heard that Wowfunhappy has recently written an RSS reader app for Pebble. This is really cool in a lot of ways – he did a bang-up job on the UI for it, and people on Reddit are already finding great uses for it, enabling things that they weren’t previously able to do on their Pebbles (like check work schedules that came as RSS feeds). And, of course, he released it entirely as open source software, which definitely speaks to me.

The fact that it’s a cool project I think is a great reason to highlight it here. But the reason I wanted to tell you about this is that this also marks a milestone of the first time we’ve added a new app to the Rebble App Store since the very first time we imported the Pebble App Store’s contents. I spent a few hours last week working with Jonathan to get this all set up, and I’m pleased to announce that the Rebble App Store is (mostly) open for submissions! Here’s some directions for how to do that, if you’ve got some Pebble apps burning a hole in your hard disk, or if you’re ready for the creative juices to start flowing. The process is a little janky right now, but I’m definitely happy to help however I can – and there are lots of us in #app-dev on Discord ready to answer questions!

It’s a new day in Pebble app development. Let’s see what you’ve got – here’s wishing all of us Rebblers an appy new year!

Jul 29, 2019 • by Joshua Wise

The shiny Rebble future: one year after the Pebble server shutdown

Hi out there, Rebble world! Joshua on the microphone here for a bit. It’s been a year since the Pebble servers have shut down, and I’m still wearing my beloved Pebble 2 on my wrist every day; as far as I can tell, it’s still the case that nothing else out there compares to these things. As the buttons start to wear out on this one, though, I’m starting to ask some of the same questions that I hear echoed out in the Pebble world: what does the future of Rebble and of Pebble-like things look like? Well, I’m an optimist on that – and I wanted to fill you all in on some of the reasons why. I’ll catch you after the fold.

Lingering in the back of my head have been three things: money, movement, and hardware. Without money, the Rebble web services can’t run; without forward movement, we fade quietly into the sunset; and without hardware, there’s nothing to put on our wrists! On all three of those, I have pretty darn good news in the short term, and I have ideas for the long run, too. I’m going to get into each of those in a moment, but before I do, I want to give you the same proviso that Katharine did last year: I can’t guarantee the future, but I’m going to give you my best guess. Let’s start!

Money

I think this is the biggest question on everyone’s mind after we watched the downfall of our beloved Pebble Technology Corporation: how can we build a sustainable way to keep our watches ticking? After all, web hosting can be pretty expensive for a cloud application like Rebble, and we’re not even making any revenue by selling watches. The solution that we came up with was to have a two-tier model: everybody gets access to the basic services for Pebble for free – firmware updates, the app store, account management, and such, but the things that cost us money – dictation and weather – we’d charge a small amount of money for, and if we got the math right, the paid users would subsidize the free users.

So the question is: how well did that work out? I’m happy to say that it seems to be working pretty well. We have around 7,000 paid users, which comes out to about an annual run rate of around $190,000. This means that we’re doing a fair bit better than breaking even for now: even though we’re not drowning in cash, Rebble is definitely managing to pay its own rent from Amazon. This is heartwarming news, and I hope that it makes everyone feel better about the sustainability of Rebble itself, and also about Rebble’s model for running services.

On that front, I wanted to thank all of you who are Rebble subscribers: without you, it wouldn’t be possible to keep this service running, and you all are amazing proof that people will pay to sustain technology that they want to have more of in their life. Maciej Ceglowski, proprietor of a small bookmarking service called Pinboard, wrote a good piece a few years ago about the importance of small paid services, and how they help build business models that center their users as a priority, instead of business models that center investors or surveillance systems as priorities; I have looked to that as inspiration, and I’m glad that we can follow in those footsteps. It’s a joy to serve you all!

I suppose this would be the right time, also, to invite those of you who haven’t joined us as subscribers to come on board! I think that $3/month (or $33/year, if you subscribe for a year at a time) is a great value for being able to dictate messages while I’m out on my bike, and for knowing at a glance when the sun is going to close me out without having to pull out my phone – and, of course, as I noted above, subscriptions go towards keeping Rebble sustainable. So it’s never too late to join the Rebble-lution!

Movement

One worry, of course, is that if Rebble is standing still, we start to look pretty dead. After all, we’d been pretty quiet for about a year after the initial Rebble Web Services launch. Well, I assure you that we’re not dead! Some of you with eagle eyes have been watching commits to the Rebble repositories, and have noticed that the pace of development has picked up some over the past few months, culminating with the most recent launch of Timeline. You might be asking: what lead to this sudden surge in motion? And will the development continue?

Well, in May, Katharine, Ish Ot Jr., and I got together in a Hangout, and we spent some time thinking about the future of Rebble. We decided that we had a little bit of money left to spare, and that we wanted to reinvest it in the development of Rebble, and so we’d pay someone to do a little engineering work. Well, precisely, we’d pay, well – me! About a year ago, I left my previous day job to do some software and hardware consulting, and as a result of that, it suddenly became possible for me to dedicate time in small quantities, rather than as “everything or nothing”. For the past few months, I’ve been doing about six hours of paid work a week or so on Rebble (and maybe another five or six during the evenings and on the weekends!) to knock off some features that we’ve been hoping to build.

I’ve been doing a bunch of work behind the scenes on building development tools and administrative features so that we can help you out with billing problems, but Timeline was the first major fruit of that work that was visible to you, our beloved users. I don’t think Timeline will be the end, either: on my to-do list is to start building out the app store developer portal, and even some work on longer-term ideas for keeping the Pebble ecosystem alive. Of course, all of the work that I’m doing is and always will be open-source, just like the rest of Rebble (it’s even written into the contract!).

I’m doing this all on the back of the amazing work that Katharine did to get Rebble Web Services off the ground. She basically put this whole thing together single-handedly, and I owe her incredible thanks for such a strong foundation to keep building on top of. If you haven’t watched her talk from !!Con West 2019, it’s a great story about how we got here, told expertly in 10 minutes – go watch it; you won’t regret it!

A year ago, Ish Ot Jr. wrote and said that we’re just getting started, and he was right. It feels to me like we have a path forward to keep building Rebble into the future: we took a breather after we launched, but we’re back at it, and now we’re geared up to – as Pebble liked to say – keep making awesome happen!

Hardware

The last piece of the puzzle, I claim, is hardware. I’m not the only one with holes bursting in the buttons of his Pebble 2. Pebble Technology Corporation isn’t making any more of the things, so in theory, our userbase is only shrinking from here, and that’s not a good place to be. How can we keep more Pebbles running for longer, and is there ever a possibility of there being more?

Pebble life support: you can save your Pebble now!

I am a die-hard believer in my Pebble 2, but as we all know, these things have a serious design defect: the silicone buttons on the side fall apart after about a year. There have been a handful of makeshift solutions out there, but I never found the Sugru approach to be great. Fortunately, the quality of 3D printing has gotten quite good in recent years – and even more fortunately, two wonderful Pebblers have been experimenting with hardware to rebuild Pebbles stronger, and, frankly, I think even better-looking. Tation and Astosia have a Shapeways store with all manner of exciting fixes for your Pebble 2, including entirely new cases that use the original “OG” Pebble buttons; they also have Imgur albums with the guts of how to dissasemble and reassemble the devices. They’re also experimenting with replacement 3D printed rubber buttons that you can glue right on. So if your Pebble 2 is falling apart, don’t despair: there are fixes that you can make today to bring it back to life! There are also some models available on Thingiverse, for those inspired to print their own.

The batteries in these things also don’t last forever, we’ve found. Luckily, it seems like you can get anything in China if you know where to look – people have had success with batteries from Aliexpress for the original Pebbles, for Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel, and for Pebble 2. If you’re handy doing a little soldering, Pebble batteries are not too tricky to replace, and you can get years more of reliable service from your beloved Pebble.

Pebble life support going forward

Here’s the bit where I start to speculate a little bit. I’ve heard rumblings of the GadgetWraps guys making some side buttons for Pebble 2 with their beautiful silicone molding process. If they do, it could be possible to get the same lovely smooth feeling buttons that you were used to, without any major surgery at all. If that sounds like something you’d like, you might want to shoot them some mail telling them that you’d be interested!

I’ve also been talking a little bit with a low-volume injection molding company. I don’t want to say too much about that, since I don’t know where it will end up, but it’s definitely possible that in the not-so-distant future, we could have new cases for Pebbles in all manner of interesting shapes designs, and materials. The logistics of selling them are very scary to me, but if there’s interest, Astosia, Tation, and I are interested in making it happen!

The post-Pebble problem

Of course, this is all well and good, but how can we bring new Rebblers into the fold? In some ideal universe, it would be nice to sell new hardware, without all of the pain of trying to limp along something that we didn’t design. What if we could improve on Pebble with new features? After all, Bluetooth microcontrollers have come a long way in the last few years in terms of power consumption…

It sounds like a pipe dream, but it’s not entirely. Over the Christmas break last year, I designed an nRF52840-powered microcontroller board that, hopefully, could be shrunk down into the form factor of a watch. A month or two later, I had a circuit board that I called “Asterix” that I had Bluetooth and a display up and running on … and a month after that, I managed to bring RebbleOS up on that, along with my Pebble app “Dali Clock”. For the first time in history, I think, I had an application that was built using only Pebble tools running on non-Pebble Technology Corp hardware!

I don’t want to get your hopes up too much. There’s a lot of work to do. Barry – who some of you on Discord may know as ginge – did an amazing job laying the groundwork for RebbleOS, but as everybody who’s come and asked about it knows, we still have a long way to go on the software front. The hardware that I have is about four times too big; I think it’s definitely possible to shrink it, but it’ll require a good amount of effort to do. And the question of manufacturing it looms huge in my mind, and I don’t know where to even start with that.

But it feels possible, in a way that it didn’t a year ago. I’m hoping that I can put some time towards that once I get Timeline settled in and under control. I don’t know anything about manufacturing, and distributing and selling them scares the dickens out of me even if I manage to make more than one of them. So, hey, if you know about these things and want to take charge of a piece of it – come in and help out! I’d be happy to work with you!

On that front, I’ll leave you with an exciting little video of Asterix booting into RebbleOS. It’s way less complete than it looks: it’s incredibly unstable, and it doesn’t even know how to talk to the Pebble app yet. There’s so much I don’t know, and I don’t even know how to estimate how much is behind it. But it’s hard not to look at it and grin. What is the purpose of the future, if not to give us something to aspire to?

Conclusions

Rebble is alive and well. I touched on three pieces: money, progress, and hardware. These three things all feed into each other: money keeps us alive, and helps us make progress; progress keeps us alive, and helps us make hardware; and keeping hardware alive keeps us alive, and lets Rebble keep making money. In the short term, Rebble is healthy on all three of these fronts. There’s a plausible idea for how we could remain healthy going forward, too! It’s going to take work, and it’s going to take the continued support of you, our amazing community, but it’s not impossible.

On a personal note, it feels very rewarding to get to serve yinz Rebblers. Pebble built a passionate group of users. I’m excited.

Ok, that seems like about it for today. Thanks for staying with us so far, and I’m looking forward to coming with you all into the Shiny Rebble Future – keep your Pebbles on your wrists!

Jul 24, 2019 • by Joshua Wise

It's Timeline time!

Hi there! Long time, no talk. Sorry for the silence, but I assure you that one year on, we’re alive and well, and we’ve got great things to share! This is the first of two posts coming your way – in the next post, we’ll talk about the shiny future of Rebble , but for now, we have an exciting announcement, and that is:

You guessed it, it’s finally time: Timeline time, to be specific! We’ve been talking about it for a year now, and thanks to the heroic effort of Maxim Teryokhin, Timeline is back up and running! If you loved apps like Note to Self, they’re ready to roll again on your wrist. We’ve spent the last few weeks carefully setting it up and testing it on RWS for everyone to use, and we’re so excited to announce that it’s ready. Timeline by now should have rolled out to all subscribers, and client-side timeline apps should work for you! We’re still rolling it out to non-subscribers – for more information on that, and on timeline apps that depend on a server, and, heck, a few other things we’ve done in the intervening time, read on below the fold.

Timeline rollout

You can tell if Timeline has hit your account yet by checking your account page. If you see a line item, “Timeline sync interval”, your account has Timeline enabled, and the next time your phone updates services, it’ll be ready to go! (If you see the “Timeline sync interval” line, and pins don’t seem to ever make it into your Timeline, you can try rerunning the initial setup. And, if you are getting errors from Timeline apps, then try uninstalling and reinstalling the watchapps in question from inside the Pebble app on your phone, so that you get the patched versions!)

All subscribers should have access to Timeline now. To make sure our servers stay happy and healthy, Timeline will be rolled out to non-subscribers over the course of about a week, so keep checking in periodically! (Of course, if you want access to Timeline right now, subscribing will instantly enable it for your account, and we’d love to have your support!)

Timeline sync

Believe it or not, Timeline is one of the more expensive services we offer, because everybody’s phone has to check in regularly to see if there are new pins. Subscribers get the added benefit of being able to check in every half an hour for new Timeline events, but everybody gets to use Timeline, even if you’re not a subscriber – non-subscriber pins will sync every three hours, instead. We’re working on ways to “opt in” to more frequent Timeline checks for power users – stay tuned for that!

Server-side Timeline apps

There are really two categories of Timeline apps: apps that post pins to your Timeline directly from your phone (“phone-side Timeline apps”), and apps that post pins from the web. We’ve automatically fixed up all the phone-side ones we could find – all 100 or so of them – but for apps that post pins to your Timeline from the web, the developers of those will have to do the patching. Luckily, the change is simple: all a developer has to do is change the endpoint that you post to from https://timeline-api.getpebble.com to https://timeline-api.rebble.io. App developers, get in touch with us if you have any questions – and users, if an app you want doesn’t work yet, gently remind the developer that we’re alive and well, and that we’d love to have them aboard!

One thing that we currently don’t support is Timeline topics. (Topics were a way that a developer could broadcast an event without having to name each of the users that cared about that event, and users could subscribe to an event.) It’s not fundamentally impossible to do that, but we haven’t implemented it yet; if you’re a developer who really wants that functionality again, get in touch and we’ll talk!

Subscription renewal

Some of you might have gotten an e-mail that your credit card has expired, without information on what to do about it. Never fear, Rebble is still here! Go to your account page, and click ‘Unsubscribe’, and then just subscribe again. If you have any time left on your subscription, it’ll automatically carry over until your next subscription begins. If you run into any problems with billing, just reply to the receipt that you got from Stripe, or reach out to us on Discord, and we’ll be happy to get you all squared away!

Dictation on iOS

Now that Note to Self is back, you might be wondering – what ever happened with dictation on iOS 11 and up? The answer is: we have a fix! Now, when you connect your watch to a Rebble-activated phone, a firmware update will get sent to your Pebble that fixes dictation on iOS 11. Hooray! (Note that this still won’t get you “send text” functionality; that requires phone carrier agreements that we’re not quite so keen on. )

Hey, where’d the Android app go?

Some of you may have noticed that the Android app is no longer on the Play Store. That’s true! A while ago, Google changed some requirements around for apps that use SMS on the Play Store, and the Pebble app didn’t make the cut. Don’t worry – the app still works just fine, you just have to download it from somewhere else! You can download it from APKMirror, and you’ll be right as rain to run Rebble on your new Android phone.

Coming up soon

Ok, that’s all from me for right now about the most important updates in the recent past. But what’s that? Are we looking… to the FUTURE?? You bet that there’s more where that came from! Coming up soon: a bright sustainable future for the Rebble Alliance!

And, of course, we enjoy talking to Pebblers who still love their devices just like we do. So if you have any questions, or just want to say hi, come visit us on Discord – we’d love to have you join the party!