The very creator of the original Pebble smartwatch, Eric Migicovsky, is receiving backlash from a dedicated volunteer group that kept the platform alive after Pebble was shut down. The community — called Rebble, a riff on Pebble — accuses the newly revived Pebble effort of seeking control over their decade’s worth of work, which could potentially mean that what used to be an open ecosystem might now be replaced by the control and power of a closed, company-run app store.
The fight comes just as Pebble’s new reboot is gathering steam. The company orchestrating the revival, Core Devices, has started sending out Pebble 2 Duos, with Migicovsky saying that about 70% of devices have flown the coop and more are on their way. A revitalized app store for early backers is also online — and that’s where the trouble starts.
What the Pebble/Rebble community alleges in dispute
Rebble says it agreed until recently to allow the new Pebble team to use its backend infrastructure for the relaunched app store, which would ensure that every app added to the community store would be mirrored within the official Pebble catalog. But the group now says that the deal is “breaking down.”
It has also, according to public statements issued by Rebble, demanded unfettered access to the community-managed data that it has curated for a number of years, and tried to pull the shutters down on the Rebble store while redirecting its domains to the new Pebble storefront. The group also accuses the company of scraping its servers and cautions that control of the data could pave the way for a “walled garden” that sidelines community stewardship and future open-source development.
Rebble says it will need a binding contract in order to be able to share backend data and services. The volunteer team argues that a resilient project needs to be built atop durable, open ecosystems — and that is even more important if the corporate-led second life sputters or changes hands again.
How Pebble got here after shutdown and community work
Pebble shut down a long time ago after being one of the pioneers in what we know today as the modern smartwatch category. In the aftermath, a group of volunteers known as Rebble began working to ensure watches remained viable, creating their own app store and fork of PebbleOS called RebbleOS. They ran servers, resurrected cloud services, and even kept older devices receiving apps and watch faces for a while.
After PebbleOS code was eventually released to the public, Core Devices set out to resurrect the brand by encouraging its existing developer ecosystem and using them to seed a new app store. For a lot of Pebble users who had used the watch since its early days, the partnership seemed like an example of how you could bridge the gap between commercial relaunch and community-led infrastructure — until negotiations reportedly fell through.
Why store control matters for Pebble apps and users
But control over an app store is also about more than just branding. It controls access to developer accounts, app binaries, update pipelines, and the metadata that links users to software. In wearables, in particular, a strong third-party catalog can really make or break the longevity of a platform, as we’ve observed with both Apple Watch and Garmin’s ecosystems — you get developers on board and that compounds platform value.
Centralizing that control under one company can speed up quality and security work, but it also raises gatekeeping risk. Community priorities tend to be continuity and openness, serving mirrored repositories and permissive licenses to avoid at least a single point of failure. Rebble’s stance embodies that philosophy: When the company calls a new play, an open mirror won’t let those watches and their apps go dark.
What it may mean for users and developers of Pebble
For the time being, Rebble says that already published apps in the new Pebble store will continue to work. The question will be how well new submissions, watch faces, and updates proceed if they cannot agree on governance and data access. A split might produce duplicate stores, redundant contributions, or lag that users don’t understand, and developer effort becomes disintegrated.
The key concerns for developers are clarity and trust: who owns the submission pipeline, how app listings are mirrored, and what assurances have been provided if one offering goes away. For users, it’s the matter of whether they can rely on a watch that will still collect apps and updates years from now.
What to watch next in the Pebble and Rebble negotiations
Rebble wants a “more official, written agreement that makes data access law of the land and lays out an open runway for the future,” according to Myriam. Best practice in such scenarios is typically to use data escrow, offer non-exclusive licenses to mirrors, and govern within an environment that has transparency between the commercial interests of a project and community support for it.
The revival of the Pebble has reignited enthusiasm among an ardent user base, and early shipments indicate strong demand. Whether that momentum builds will likely depend on a compromise that retains the hard-won resilience of the community while authorizing the new Pebble to scale. For a platform founded on longevity against all odds, the next chapter will be defined as much by how it’s governed as by the hardware to come.