The Rebble community writes about keeping Pebble smartwatches running after Pebble shut down, including its web services and disputes with Core Devices.
HN commenters point to it as the community effort keeping Pebble watches working; one criticizes Discord as the only place a decision was announced.
He had no way of continuing to support his customers without money. I doubt he personally made more than a token amount on the sale, liquidation preferences and all that. If selling out was his goal he could have sold out for a whole lot more money a year prior and chose not to.
> they clearly added value
A tiny amount compared to the whole, Core Devices' own contributions are larger, and the firmware remains open source! Nothing was stolen!
As for Eric giving credit to Rebble:
repebble.com: "This was also made possible by the Rebble team and community, who have supported Pebble since it shut down"
Eric's YouTube: "thanks to the clever work of Liam, one of my past Pebble colleagues and avid Rebble contributor, we switched to using an open source BLE stack called Nimble."
Eric's blog: "thanks to Rebble for keeping everyone engaged with a product that hasn’t been on sale since 2016!"
More on Eric's blog: "For the last 9 years, the Rebble Alliance has been keeping the Pebble dream alive. [...] I’m a huge fan" "Without the community or the OS, there is zero chance that these new watches would be possible! Thank you Rebble!"
Yet more on Eric's blog: "I’d like to thank [...] The Rebble Alliance - they’ve been keeping the Pebble torch lit in the intervening years, and (hopefully) continue nurturing and empowering the community years into the future."
Eric's social media: "Thank you, Google and Rebble! I can't stress how thankful I am to @pebble_dev (http://Rebble.io) and…
TL;DR: Succinctness has never been my strong suit? :)
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> But I'm not really sure that this fear is grounded - before we sold to Fitbit we 'unlocked' the Pebble mobile app [...].
If I'm reading OP's comment & your reply correctly, my impression is there's potentially a fear of either (a) "re-locking"; or, even just (b) "new thing not unlocked"--and, I think, you're saying that (a) isn't going to/can't happen?
On closer reading I think you might also be saying that (b) isn't going to happen because "new thing" is still going to use the previous unlocked app and/or maybe a new unlocked app? But, if that's the case, I only really saw that possible interpretation after a much closer re-read.
(Alternatively, maybe I just didn't weight sufficiently strongly the FAQ: "Will it be exactly like Pebble?" "Yes. In almost every way.")
More broadly (outside the positive example of your specific track record with regard to OGPebble & the app unlocking), given the landscape of the past 1.5+ decades littered with even just recent examples such as Spotify's Car Thing, Google's Stadia controller, Bambu Labs, and pretty much every phone ever[0][0a], I think it would be a stretch to consider the fear to be entirely ungrounded.
Particularly if some portion of the device firmware etc and/or server software is still going to be closed source.
In terms of strength of confidence in the potential of achieving a "desired open outcome/ongoing experience", I imagine the ordering from least to…
I agree, and Rebble themselves highlight how inflammatory their initial blog post was in their most recent one: https://rebble.io/2025/11/24/rebble-in-your-own-world.html .
They also backed down from their ludicrous position that they are acting as protectors of other people's watchfaces being downloaded in bulk by a particular company they don't like, whereas they are totally fine with the watchfaces being publicly available for general use. It clearly reads as them trying to clutch control of the one thing they haven't open sourced.
Rebble contributors did have a legitimate gripe, which is that they were lead to develop some additional software under the idea that there would be an agreement at the end of the day. But the Rebble Foundation's response to this was totally immature and irrational.
I agree with what Eric said in his follow up, which is that it is quite concerning to engage in a partnership with an organization which reacts like this as part of a negotiation process. God knows I wouldn't, and it doesn;t surprise me that an alternative solution was found.
There's 2 main alternatives for smartwatch OS:
For Pebble there is Rebble [1] and for touchscreen smartwatches there is AsteroidOS [2]. You wanna look at the first although most functions of the stock firmware should remain working. They'll for sure stay running till June 2018.
As for the subject (I skimmed through the article), I think its true. I own a Pebble 2 as well and I'd love to buy a smartwatch with similar features (7 days battery life, music control, customisable watchface, stepcounter, calendar, alarms, Google Drive app, workout app, 2FA app, to-do list app, and 4 hardware buttons or some inventive way to be easily usable during sports (the scrollwheels don't cut it)). I haven't found any (nevermind the price of the Pebble being very competitive). Mind you, I did find some devices which were very good at some of these features.
[1] https://rebble.io
[2] https://asteroidos.org/about/
Well now we have a conundrum - the top 3 posts on the frontpage are all about this!
The submitted title of this post was "Google has open-sourced the pebble smartwatch operating system" but it actually points to https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html, so I've changed the title and moved the comments from here to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070, which has the Google announcement.
The 3 threads are:
We're bringing Pebble back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091
Google open-sources the Pebble OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070
The future of Rebble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 (<-- you are here)
The mentioned blog post (https://rebble.io/2025/11/17/core-devices-keeps-stealing-our-work.html) is a pretty great example why using Discord as your main communication tool for an open source project is the wrong choice. The only way to read about the decisions ("Shortly after, Core forked PebbleOS1 away from public maintainership. Back in June, they said that they would merge back periodically2;") is to read the manual transcript they added to the blog post.