Pebble vs. Rebble?

I've just sent an email to Eric Migicovsky, the founder of the Pebble smartwatch company, which went bankrupt in 2016. He's also the founder of Core Devices, the company behind launching new Pebble hardware in 2025.

Here's what my email says.¹

Hi Eric!

I'm writing as one of the people who pre-ordered a Pebble Time 2 the day you've announced them, back in March. And I'm considering canceling that pre-order.

I have never owned a Pebble before. Not because I'm too young, or not a hacker, or because I didn't find the concept intriguing back in the day – I just wasn't that interested in actually wearing a smartwatch.

In 2024, I have several smartwatches, and one thing I'm consistently bummed out about is how limited I am in modifying them to my liking. I still don't own a Pebble because I didn't want to buy a used one, but I've thought something akin to "I wish I had bought a Pebble back when they were still around" more than once. They were for the hackers and tinkerers, they had the most open ecosystem and the best community.

Which is why when you announced new Pebbles this year, I didn't need a lot of time to decide whether I wanted one. With Android dismantling sideloading, enshittification on the rise, and increasing distrust in US-based companies due to the whole political situation, I had been moving towards open-source and community-based solutions for several years now, and was evaluating any new device or software with these priorities in mind. And Pebble, as always, was promising openness and hackability.

This morning, I woke up to the blog post by the Rebble community complaining about increasing tensions with you and your company. It made me sad and angry, and I'm writing to ask you to reconsider the way Core Devices is collaborating with the community.

In your 2022 post about success and failure at Pebble, you recognize the failed attempt "to expand beyond our initial geeky/hacker user base" as one of the reasons for the eventual bankruptcy. This is still your user base! Even though non-technical but privacy-focused people might be another part of your demographic these days, I'd argue that you still can't alienate the hackers. Because without them, there will be no real community around the new Pebbles, no new apps, no unpaid patches to bugs, and so on.

Of course I can't speak for everyone, but I don't think the hackers are buying Pebbles because of their superior hardware, or because they have the best apps, but because of the promise of openness. And the behavior that Rebble is describing in their post is really hurting your reputation there.

Now, I can't know your motives here. To me, it looks like you're trying to take back control over the ecosystem, and I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that it's because you want to provide a smooth, streamlined experience to users, and also to be able to quickly make changes to stuff that you think needs fixing, unilaterally, without community consensus.

And I kind of get it…? You have a schedule to keep, and code to write, and a vision of how everything is supposed to work. Also, you're the founder of this whole thing; without you, Pebble wouldn't exist, and Rebble wouldn't either.

But: Without Rebble, there wouldn't be an app store for you to come back to either. There wouldn't be much of a community left. You'd have to start from scratch, and also work against skepticism like "so, how long is it gonna take until my device goes end of life this time?"

Because people are tired of their ecosystems and tech stacks becoming obsolete or abandoned or unbearably commercialized every couple of years. They want something that lasts. And please don't take this the wrong way, but: They don't trust you to provide this, or guarantee for it.

And frankly, I can't blame them.

But they do trust you to build the hardware, manage the business and legal stuff, and also bring new innovation and enthusiasm into the Pebble world. You can still lead this thing, but you'll have to involve the community in it and gain back some of the trust they lost when Pebble went out of business. (Scraping the community-run app store isn't helping.)

You'd like to be "benevolent dictator" instead of introducing open governance? I get that. Managing a community is hard and rarely satisfying work. But you'll need to work closer with the community if you really want Pebble to be sustainable this time. Because if you alienate the enthusiasts, I don't think Pebble stands a chance against established smartwatch vendors.

We really don't need another walled garden, and while I want to believe you when you say that you're not building one, actions do speak louder than words, and the actions Rebble has posted about don't look that reassuring.

Before I end this long email (thanks for making it this far!), there's another thought I'd like to bring up.

Have you ever heard about the Synthstrom Deluge? It's a synthesizer/sampler/sequencer/groovebox made by a small team in New Zealand. The device itself isn't cheap and pretty niche compared to large global brands like Roland or Korg or Novation or Elektron, but it has some features others lack, and a very enthusiastic fan base. Sound familiar?

In 2023, they made their firmware open source. (Scroll down for the original announcement.) The community was ecstatic about this, but also concerned: Selling the hardware was (and is) basically Synthstrom's only source of revenue. Would there be cheap clones appearing, driving the company out of business? Would there be dozens of competing firmware variants, causing the community to fracture?

None of that happened; Synthstrom is still sustainable, selling hardware, and have said that the open source development "has blown away all possible expectations". There is one community firmware, with dozens of contributors, who have implemented more features and fixed more bugs than Synthstrom's team would have ever been able to on their own. And Synthstrom isn't even managing this effort. They provided the original source code and some advice, but other than that, the whole software development process is now completely community-owned and -managed, and everybody is loving it.

Anyway, I'm gonna leave you with that. Thank you so much for listening. I'm looking forward to a sustainable, open, and enthusiastic future for Pebble.

Kind regards

Tim.

November 19 update: Eric has sent me a friendly reply and pointed me to his blog post about the situation.

A few of the links you can see here don't appear in my actual email and have been added just for this blog post. ↩