Pebble, Rebble, and a Path Forward

I believe the Pebble community, Core Devices, Rebble and I all want the same thing. We love our Pebbles and want them to keep working long into the future. We love the community that has sprung up around Pebble, and how it’s persevered - next year will be the 14th anniversary of the original Kickstarter campaign!

But I have to respond to claims made by Rebble posted on their blog yesterday. I will link to their post so you can read their side of the story, and I’ve asked them to link back to this blog post from theirs.

Look - I’m the first person to call myself out when I fail. I wrote a detailed blog post about Success and Failure at Pebble and often write in detail about learning from my mistakes. But in this specific case, you’ll find that I’ve done my utmost to respect the Pebble legacy and community. Rebble is misleading the community with false accusations.

For those just passing through, here’s the TLDR:

Core Devices is a small company I started in 2025 to relaunch Pebble and build new Pebble smartwatches. Rebble is a non-profit organization that has supported the Pebble community since 2017. Rebble has done a ton of great work over the years and deserves recognition and support for that.

Core Devices and Rebble negotiated an agreement where Core would pay $0.20/user/month to support Rebble services. But the agreement broke down after over the following disagreement.

Rebble believes that they ‘100%’ own the data of the Pebble Appstore. They’re attempting to create a walled garden around 13,000 apps and faces that individual Pebble developers created and uploaded to the Pebble Appstore between 2012 and 2016. Rebble later scraped this data in 2017.

I disagree. I’m working hard to keep the Pebble ecosystem open source. I believe the contents of the Pebble Appstore should be freely available and not controlled by one organization.

Rebble posted a blog post yesterday with a bunch of false accusations, and in this post I speak to each of them.

Sections

Short history#

Dec 2016 - Pebble shut down. Some IP was sold to Fitbit. I blogged about why I think we failed. Fitbit continued to run the Pebble Appstore and web services for 1.5 years. I really appreciated that.
- Rebble organization grew out of the official Pebble Developers Discord.
July 2018, Fitbit shut down the Pebble appstore.
- Before it shut down, Rebble (and others) scraped all 13,000 apps and metadata from the Pebble Appstore. Rebble began hosting a copy of the appstore. They created a new Dev Portal where developers could upload new apps, roughly 500 have been uploaded since July 2018.
- Rebble also reverse engineered many Pebble web services (weather, timeline and voice transcription) and provided them as a paid service for the Pebble community.
Jan 2025 - Google open sourced PebbleOS, breathing new life into the community.
March 2025 - I announced a new company (Core Devices) and 2 new watches - store.rePebble.com
November 2025 - we finished shipping out 5,000 Pebble 2 Duos. We’re working hard on Pebble Time 2. We’re aiming to start shipping in January.

Their accusations#

Accusation 1: ‘Rebble paid for the work that [Eric] took as a base for his commercial watches’

Facts:

I think they’re accusing me of ‘stealing’ open source contributions to PebbleOS that Rebble paid for. This is entirely false.
We did not take any PebbleOS work Rebble paid for ‘as a base for [our] commercial watches’. ~~To my best of my knowledge~~, ~~Rebble never paid the~~ ~~developer who ported NimBLE into PebbleOS.~~ ~~My best guess is that they are referring to Rebble having paid CodeCoup, the company behind~~ ~~NimBLE~~, to fix some bugs that affected older non-Core Devices watches. Any Rebble-sponsored CodeCoup commits are not present in our repo. In fact, the opposite is true - we paid Codecoup $10,000 to fix multiple BLE stack issues, some of them on the host side that benefit all devices, including old Pebbles. Update: I’m told Rebble did pay him, months later. My point is valid - when we shifted development to our repo, Rebble had not paid anything. More broadly, I reject the premise that using open source software under the terms of the license, regardless of who funds development, is ‘stealing’.
We started using our own repo for PebbleOS development because PRs on the Rebble repo reviews were taking too long. We only had one firmware engineer at the time (now we have a whopping 2!) and he felt like he was being slowed down too much. All of our contributions to PebbleOS have been 100% open source.
Overall, the feedback that PebbleOS could benefit from open governance is well taken. Long term, PebbleOS would be a good fit for open source organization with experience in open governance, like Apache or Linux Foundation. I wrote about this last week.
With our small team and fairly quick development schedule, it's true that we haven't PRed our changes into Rebble’s repo. It’s tough to prioritize this while we are busy fixing bugs and getting ready for Pebble Time 2.

Accusation 2: ‘Core took Rebble’s work’ on libpebblecommon to create libpebble3

Facts:

The majority (>90%) of our new open sourcelibpebble3 library was written by Core Devices employees. The remainder comes from libpebblecommon, another open source library written by two people.
In April 2025, Core purchased the copyright to the libpebblecommon code from the two maintainers and incorporated it into libpebble3^{^{^*}}^{^{^*}}, which is also open source^{^*}^{^*}.
All our contributions to libpebble3 are GPL-3.0 licensed. Here’s the motivation behind that our licensing strategy for this repo. We use the same CLA agreement as Matrix, QT and MySQL. Our CLA explicitly includes a clause that requires to Core Devices to distribute all contributions under an OSI-compatible FOSS license (e.g. GPLv3).
Note that neither Rebble libpebblecommon maintainer signed the Rebble blog post.

Side note regarding Cobble, I don’t think Rebble even knows this but in 2024, I personally spent over $30,000 to support its development, way before PebbleOS was open source. It was my own way to support the community.

Accusation 3: ‘Core promised that they would let Rebble maintain and own the developer site’

Facts:

Nothing of the sort was agreed upon. See the full written agreement that Core Devices has with Rebble towards the bottom. Rebble agreed that Core would host the developer site.
I have been maintaining and updating the developer site personally - all open source. Having two sources of truth would be confusing for the community.

Accusation 4: ‘[Eric] scraped our app store, in violation of the agreement that we reached with him previously’

Note: ‘scraping’ usually means to automated extraction of data from a website.

Facts:

Here’s what happened. I wanted to highlight some of my favourite watchfaces on the Pebble Appstore. Last Monday Nov 10, after I put my kids to sleep and between long calls with factories in Asia, I started building a webapp to help me quickly go through Pebble Appstore and decide which were my top picks.
Let me be crystal clear - my little webapp did not download apps or ‘scrape’ anything from Rebble. The webapp displayed the name of each watchface and screenshots and let me click on my favs. I used it to manually look through 6000 watchfaces with my own eyes. I still have 7,000 to go. Post your server logs, they will match up identically to the app I (well…Claude) wrote (source code here)
I integrated these picks into the Pebble Appstore on Saturday and posted about it on Sunday.

All of four of these accusations could have been clarified simply by asking me. Instead, Rebble decided to post them on their blog and threaten a lawsuit.

Backstory#

How did we get here?

Why are there dueling blog posts in the Pebbleverse?

I think most of the people are behind Rebble are great and the community overall is awesome. I know they truly mean well, but there are many aspects of the org that are severely troubling. I am very close with one of the Rebble board members, who I consider a personal friend. Over the years, I learned a lot about the organization and helped coach him through some major disputes between board members.

I exchanged literally thousands of messages with my friend on this topic over the span of 3 years. I refrained from getting too involved, despite being asked several times to join Rebble as a board member or lead the organization. I demurred - I saw how painful it was for him and I had no interest in being part of that.

Core Devices + Rebble: 2025

PebbleOS is now open source! Yay. This is thanks to the work of many Googlers, ex-Pebblers and others - I called out (hopefully) all of them in my blog post in March. I really wanted Rebble to be a part of the Pebble revival going forward. I hired 3 people from Rebble to join Core Devices. I regularly brought up Rebble’s efforts over the years.

I engaged with Rebble folks in discussions in the spring on how we could formally work together, and then made some concrete proposals in the summer. One difficulty was that Core Devices is a business with customers and schedules. This didn’t always sync up with the timeframes of a non-profit. Things became very drawn out. It was very hard to pin people down, even on simple stuff like what the goals of Rebble as an organization were.

Regardless, I continued pushing to make Rebble a key part of the Pebble relaunch.

By August, we finally got close to an agreement.

On September 30 2025, we agreed to the following document and published respective blog posts (ours, theres). Core Devices would pay Rebble $0.20/user/month. I considered it a donation to a group that has done so much to support the community. But I purposely pushed for openness - no single group (Core Devices or Rebble) should be in control.

Notice the final bullet in the App store section:

All binary/metadata (including historical apps) will be published as archive file (no scraping Rebble services)

Looking back, we should have had more clear wording in this agreement. But this was after months of chat discussions and hours of Zoom calls. I honestly thought that we had reached an agreement to make the archive open, like in this message I received from a Rebble board member.

By the end of October, Rebble has changed their mind about providing an archive file.

Our disagreement#

Not withstanding their false accusations of theft, the crux of our disagreement is the archive of 13,000 Pebble apps and watchfaces that were uploaded to the Pebble Appstore in July 2018 before it was shut down.

I believe that these apps and watchfaces should be archived publicly and freely accessible by anyone. They should not held behind a walled garden by one organization. I repeatedly advocated for hosting this data on a neutral 3rd party like Archive.org.
Rebble believes ‘the data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% Rebble’ (this is a direct quote from their blog post). They repeatedly refer to all watchfaces and watchapps as ‘our data’.

This is just plainly false. The apps and watchfaces were originally uploaded by individual developers to an appstore run by a company that no longer exists. These folks created beautiful work and shared them freely with the Pebble community. I’ve spoken with numerous Pebble app developers about this. After the fall of Pebble Tech Corp, none of them envisioned one single organization claiming ownership of their work and restricting access, or charging money for access.

Let’s do the right thing - honour the original developers and create a free publicly available archive of their beautiful watchfaces and watchapps.

Our plan for the future#

It's easy to assume the worst in situations like this. But our plan for the appstore is pretty straightforward. We’re working on rewriting the appstore frontend to be native in the mobile app rather than a web view. Rebble’s appstore backend API will be the data source. Rebble’s dev portal is where developers upload apps. No subscription or Rebble account will not be required to download apps. We intend to curate how the appstore is displayed Pebble app.

We’re excited to see other Pebble-supporting mobile apps pop up - like MicroPebble and GadgetBridge, offering different features and experiences. We’d love to support these efforts with open source code or financially.

Reading things like ‘We’re happy to let them build whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt Rebble’ in their blog post worries me. Take our voice-to-text and weather features. Rebble currently offers these as part of their paid subscription. Our new Pebble mobile app includes a on-device speech-to-text feature. We’re planning to include weather for free in our app and make the data available to all watchfaces so you don’t need to configure each one separately. These features are better for users but would they ‘hurt’ Rebble? Will I need to ask permission from Rebble before building these features? It’s clear that the goals of a non-profit and device manufacturer will not always be in alignment.

Now consider the appstore. It’s a fundamental part of the Pebble experience. Even before yesterday’s accusations, I felt wary about relying too heavily on a 3rd party like Rebble to provide such a critical service. When people buy a watch from Core Devices, they expect to be able to download apps and watchfaces. If Rebble leadership changes their mind, how can I be certain I can deliver a good experience for our customers? This is one of the primary reasons I think it’s important for an archive of the Pebble Appstore to be freely available.

Rebble still has the chance to redeem itself and do right by the community#

Rebble - prove that you believe in an open, unrestricted Pebble community. Tear down the walled garden you are trying to create. Publish your copy of the Pebble Appstore archive. Stop saying that you ‘100%’ own other developers data. Let’s move on from this ridiculous sideshow and focus on making Pebble awesome!

I’ve worked hard to structure everything that we’re doing to be sustainable for the long term, and to do right by the Pebble community. I think Rebble should do the same.

I earned almost nothing from Pebble Tech Corp. I paid myself a $65,000 salary each year. I did not get any payout through the asset sale. I fought to make sure that all Pebble employees were taken care of as best as possible, and that the Pebble community would live on. I believe that at every turn, I’ve done right by the community.

I didn’t relaunch Pebble to make a lot of money. My goal this time round is to make it sustainable. I want to continue making more watches and cool gadgets. There are no investors. I am taking huge risks doing this. I relaunched it because I love Pebble and want it to live on long into the future. Generally, I am excited and positive for the future, despite everything.

For everyone else, again, I apologize for the extreme amounts of inside baseball and the better things you could be doing with your time. I’ll leave the comments open here. Please refrain from any personal attacks or vicious comments (at myself or other people) - follow the HN guidelines.

Eric Migicovsky