Bring life back to your Pebble

Nov 19, 2025 • by Joshua Wise

Some Personal Thoughts On This Whole Mess

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

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

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

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

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.

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…