I do wonder how a modern revival of Pebble will compete from a product perspective within the current landscape. Obviously there's the high-end Apple Watches, but there's also incredibly cheap and long battery life products from China that you can see on Aliexpress and similar. Fitness tracking is another related niche that seems oversaturated, unless you do something really unique in biometrics sensing.
So it seems like a hard market to get back into, curious where they take things.
The question is indeed if it's a big enough market to carry to the company. I hope so.
The Pebble software is second to none in nailing the basics. I'll definitely continue to choose Pebble over no-name brands on AliExpress.
They actually sold more than the whole run; I ordered one, and recently got an email informing me that they don't actually have the parts to fulfill the order.
I switched to a Pebble 2 Duo recently and while the features are comparable on paper (multi-week battery life, reflective display, basic health tracking, etc.), everything is just nicer on the Pebble. The software is thoughtful and fun and there are tons of third-party apps, so it can do all kinds of things the Bip could never do.
There really isn't a huge market for this kind of thing; most people, including nerds, want a watch with a brightly colored screen and tons of health metrics and service integrations. I imagine Pebble will stay a boutique brand this time around.
> Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more. If you want a Pebble, I recommend pre-ordering a Pebble Time 2 soon.
Is this supposed to be a collector's item? I'm not sure I'd want to invest in an ecosystem where damaging the device means I'm out or stuck waiting in line for replacement - with no guarantee the new device will be similar enough.
Pebble Time 2 are designed from scratch and expected to be still available after the pre-order batches have been shipped out.
I just hope supporting this limited run model will not consume too much resources.
(The buttons, however, are atrocious - mushy, hard to press, and literally falling apart. I'll probably do the 3D-printed button mod but to advertise this watch as IPX8 water resistant is ludicrous. The first button press out of the box put a crack in the silicone.)
But kudos to Eric and Claudio, they're shipping me a replacement (in white, which, as I understand it and as they said in their email, should be less susceptible to the issue, something about the white rubber versus black makes it less problematic). My only frustration was how quickly it failed, since I know it's a new-old-stock case.
Highly looking forward to the Time 2. I only stopped using my Pebble Time Steel when the battery life degraded to ~3 days (after about 6 years), used a Fossil Hybrid for a few years, now a Pixel watch. Measuring battery life in weeks will be a breath of fresh air :)
But I do want to dig into that, someday. There is an open source library in Kotlin multi-platform for building applications that interact with the watch (libpebble3) and, in theory, Bluetooth LE can connect to more than one device. But the PebbleOS probably restricts it.
My dream is to use the watch to authenticate to computers, websites and IoT devices.
BTW, Amazfit, rules.
Then, when they were being sold, instead of shutting down the Pebble store and basically bricking all Pebble watches, they intentionally opened it up to make it possible for community support. Which is where Rebble stepped in.
Bizarre and disingenuous take. That really doesn't take into account Pebble's actions, much less their words.
Nobody is perfect, and running a small hardware startup is difficult. I'm not saying Eric and co are perfect, but it seems like he's been fairly forthright about the mistakes made at Pebble[1] and what Core aims to do better.
Shit happens, people make mistakes, Apple/Google decide to compete with you and/or lock you out of parts of their garden.
https://9to5google.com/2025/01/27/pebble-smartwatch-2025-goo...
As enshittification encroaches on every corner of the technology ecosystem, a company putting out products in 2025 in a way that embraces its community and works in the open is laudable.
Maybe Pebble will turn evil one day, but at least the watches we have today will still work until they physically wear out, not when the company decides they should die.
(Nothing against those projects, I enjoyed them for what they were as well.)
I hope this revival will be sustainable and bring back some of that brilliance.
Apple severely restricts what you can install in the hardware you buy from them. Google will soon restrict the installation of Android apps not signed by Google. Microsoft restricts you to use your computer without a Microsoft account. John Deere restricts you from fixing your machines with parts sold by others. Espresso machine manufacturers restrict the capsules you can use in their machines. AWS makes everything incompatible and hard to migrate to other cloud providers.
They all follow the IBM business model: you buy IBM and end up fenced in blue in a walled garden that you can't escape.
I don't want that. I don't want to buy machines that come with a leach.
Its goals are battery life and a simple set of features including notifications from the phone via Bluetooth. You seem to have different needs, and there are other smartwatches being produced which attempt to address them.
https://developer.rebble.io/tutorials/watchface-tutorial/par...
The section on "Setting Expectations" (5 employees vs 180) is the most valuable insight. As an indie developer myself, I'm deeply curious: how does this new "sustainable" mindset (vs. the old VC-funded model) change your prioritization for the software roadmap?
Does it mean focusing 100% on the core functions and being more ruthless about saying 'no' to feature creep, which is something that plagues so many other wearable companies?
Rooting for you all.
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