(re)Introducing the Pebble Appstore

TL:DR

Production Updates#

Pebble 2 Duo

For those who didn’t catch my blog post last week (pls read), we manufactured 2,960 white Pebble 2 Duos in September! Pretty good for the first month of production. These watches are being transferred to our fulfillment center and will be shipped out soon.

Black Pebble 2 Duo production did not start until the end of September, and then got interrupted by a China/Hong Kong holiday. Extremely sorry for the delay on black!

Pebble Time 2

One fun piece of Pebble Time 2 software development news - we added a feature to make existing Pebble watchfaces/apps now (optionally) scale up to fill larger and higher resolution Pebble Time 2 display! Previous generation Pebble rectangular displays measured 144x168 pixels in 1.26" diagonal, but Pebble Time 2 is 200x228 pixels in 1.5", existing faces/apps would have had a black border on PT2. Many thanks to Alina for posting this idea on Discord.

This is fantastic because it will allow all older apps/faces to fill up the whole screen. Even better though, many Pebble developers are already upgrading their apps/faces to support the bigger screen natively, like Lignite’s beautiful face Mosaic.

Pebble Time 2 hardware development is going pretty well. We finished EVT (engineering verification test) and we’re now heading into the DVT (design verification test) stage. We’re still working on a number of tasks like tuning the stainless steel PVD hard coating, testing water resistance, integrating our firmware test suite into the factory ERP and more fun stuff.

Schedule-wise, we’re behind where I would have liked to be in October. We’re now aiming to start mass production just around the end of the year (12/26 to be precise). That means December pre-orders will not ship out until January at the earliest. We’ll try our best to catch up, but the other looming date is the start of the lunar new year (factory shuts down Feb 1 through 17). We’ve got our work cut out for us! We’ll get it done.

Now onto the main event…

(re)Introducing the Pebble Appstore#

The wonderful Slides of Time

For those of you who forgot or weren’t around 10 years ago, one of the most awesome parts of Pebble is the huge selection of fun/quirky/beautiful/clever/useful apps and watchfaces (from here I’ll just call them both ‘apps’). These were made by an extraordinarily talented community of casual developers, who primarily built apps for themselves and shared them with the broader public. This was facilitated by a damn good SDK, APIs, devtools and documentation created by the friendly and talented software and devrel teams at Pebble.

I think the ease of development and hackability of Pebble truly made the world a better place, one little app at a time. I love hearing stories from people who first learned how to program on a free Pebble they got from a hackathon (we gave away thousands this way). Books were written. Tools were created. My then-girlfriend now-wife (a biochemistry professor) even learned Pebble.JS to create an amino acid flash card app for her students! Yes, we are nerds.

Over 2,000 apps and 10,000 watchfaces were created and hosted on the Pebble Appstore. It’s time to get (re)acquainted with them - browse away on apps.rePebble.com!

Enjoy the same apps and faces you loved from before, plus some new ones created since 2016 by the developer community that over the last few years never ceased to keep creating beautiful face and fun, british, specific, useful, timely apps and amazing games (this is an beautiful Pokemon game written for Pebble in 2023!).

All existing Pebble apps are compatible with the new watches, though some apps may not work anymore due to broken settings pages, obsolete APIs, etc. Hopefully as we ship out more new watches, some developers will re-emerge to rescue some of these apps. I’m sure new apps will also rise to fill any voids!

What are your favourite Pebble apps and watchfaces? Share links to your favs in the comment section below!

In partnership with Rebble#

For the last 9 years, the Rebble Alliance has been keeping the Pebble dream alive. Many of you have used their web services, Discord, helpful instructions or dev portal. I’m a huge fan - I’ve been a daily active user since 2017. Without Rebble, it’s unlikely that the Pebble community would be as in-tact as it is today. On top of that, several members of the Rebble (and ex-Pebble colleagues) were absolutely critical in helping Google open-source PebbleOS. Without the community or the OS, there is zero chance that these new watches would be possible! Thank you Rebble!

One other great thing that Rebble did was in 2017 - they archived and started hosting a copy of the Pebble Appstore, before the servers were shut down. New apps uploaded by developers since 2017 have also been popping up!

We have partnered with Rebble to re-introduce the appstore. Their web services now power the Pebble appstore backend. New apps submitted via dev-portal.rebble.io will show up on Pebble Appstore as well.

You won’t need a subscription with Rebble in order to access the Appstore. Core Devices is funding Rebble, a non-profit, directly to provide this service. You can still donate or subscribe to Rebble and support their community efforts!

New and Improved#

The Pebble Appstore now lives on apps.rePebble.com. The web view looks, feels and generally is the same as in 2016, with a few new tweaks and improvements:

Social link previews - share your favourite watchfaces on WhatsApp, Twitter, Bluesky, Discord, etc! Like PebbleEye 007

Similar Apps/Recommendations - while building this feature, I was reminded about the true depth of the Pebble app catalog. It’s easy to get caught up in the ‘most hearted’ section…use this new feature at the bottom of each app page to discover hidden gems! It’s not perfect, but it’s helped me discover some awesome apps.

Additionally, we’re thinking about adding new features like:

Click to try out the app in an emulator
Detecting and warning users about broken APIs and settings pages
More and better categories
Better discovery and recommendations
Highlighting less-hearted apps (give new apps a chance vs old ones with a lot of hearts)
What new features should we add next? Add a comment below!

How to build an app or watchface for Pebble in 2025#

One of our goals with this next phase of Pebble is to nurture and facilitate an awesome, easy and dare-we-say fun developer experience for the Pebble developer community. Part of what made the experience so awesome before was the developer relations team! We unfortunately do not have the resources to recruit the whole team back (though I wish we could!). Luckily many of the great decisions they made continue to pay off.

The great news is that over the summer, we had an insanely productive intern on our team. He dusted off the SDK, updated it from Python2 → 3 and even built a CloudPebble-like way to build Pebble apps entirely in the browser.

What’s working now

Try the Pebble SDK! Tested on Mac, Windows (WSL) and Linux
Or use the Cloud IDE → build hello-world and see it on an emulator, all in your browser, in under 2 minutes!
Build an app with AI → run pebble new-project —ai then open dir in Claude Code or Cursor (etc) and prompt your way to your own custom app or watchface
Submit your apps to the appstore
Upgrade your apps to support the larger 200x228 px display on Pebble Time 2, run it on the emulator using pebble install --emulator emery (just like Obsidian!)

What’s on the SDK roadmap:

Pebble packages support in SDK
Adding Timeline support into the Pebble mobile app
New APIs for barometer, touchscreen, speaker
JS SDK - brand new, powered by Moddable. This will replace Rocky.js
Fixing bugs!

Sneak peek - new Pebble mobile app#

It’s not 100% ready yet, but if you want to try the new Pebble mobile app for iPhone and Android…you can 🙂 rePebble.com/app (with caveats).