What you need to know
- Google has made the PebbleOS source code available for download and free use.
- Original Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky plans to launch a “new Pebble-like smartwatch” with “the same beloved features” as before.
- These features include the trademark e-paper screen, long battery life, and “hackable” software for users.
- Other groups, including the “Rebble” project for recreating Pebble’s software, will be able to use Pebble’s code for their own watches.
The Pebble brand has been dead for nearly a decade, but Google is allowing its devoted fans and former engineers to resurrect PebbleOS by making the code open-source.
The Google Open Source Blog announced the news, sharing the Github repository for the PebbleOS source code. Although some “proprietary source code” was removed, anyone can take the remaining code and generate a new version of PebbleOS, with functionality like “notifications, media controls, fitness tracking, and support for custom apps and watchfaces” available.
Pebble watches have a beloved cult following that has persisted well after the company’s 2016 sale to Fitbit — which Google acquired (along with Pebble’s IP) a few years later. Our editor Jerry Hildenbrand reviewed the Pebble Time back in 2015, with a generally positive impression along with some dislikes of its unique design.
Now Pebble’s former founder, Eric Migicovsky, has announced plans to bring back the Pebble brand, launching a new watch with “the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well.”
On his personal blog, Migicovsky explains that he “asked friends at Google… if they could open source PebbleOS,” and that “over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this.”
Now that PebbleOS is officially open source, Migicovsky and his “small team” can launch a Pebble clone — even if they can’t call the watch “Pebble.” Google still owns the name, after all! Considering some Pebble watch owners still wear these watches all these years later, they’ll no doubt be eager to see how this new version stands the test of time.
What new Pebble watches might look like
“Lessons were learned last time,” Migicovsky admits in his blog post, referring to how he oversaw Pebble’s massive popularity burst on Kickstarter, the company’s overambitious growth, and its failure to grow to match costs, leading to the need to sell Pebble to Fitbit.
His 2024 blog post “Success and failure at Pebble” runs through where things went wrong. He highlighted things like the “too damn big” bezel on the Pebble Time and how they “failed to reposition” Pebble beyond the “hacker” crowd to productivity and fitness users. But the main issue seemed to be a simple case of spending too much money before Pebble was ready to earn enough revenue back.
With this project, it seems that the new Pebble team plans to stick to its strengths, with a geeky, niche watch that’ll appeal to a core group of power users — similar to Nothing phones in that space — rather than using massive resources to try and compete with Android smartwatches or Apple Watches.
Some of the key features of this hypothetical Pebble successor are, according to Migicovsky’s post, a sunlight-readable e-paper screen, long battery life, physical buttons for functions like music controls, and a “hackable” OS that lets you create your own watch faces and apps.
We’re curious to see what new features this team will focus on. Health and fitness tracking are the most obvious growth areas for smartwatches these days, but that might require more resources than this small team can reasonably create.
I myself wrote last year about how I wished that a watch company would bring back Pebble smart straps; that’s more about hardware than source code, but given how Pebble took such a unique approach, it’ll be fascinating to see what old ideas make it into the new version.
Of course, the Repebble team isn’t the only group invested in reviving Pebble. There’s also the Rebble community project, which had been working on a RebbleOS replacement firmware and now have plans to use the PebbleOS source code within their new project. And any other group could shoot their shot at a Pebble-like watch if they want!
If you’re interested in buying — or seeing more info about — Migicovskys mysterious new Pebble successor, you can sign up on the site for email updates, with the promise to share “full details about the new watch and shipping timeline” and to “prioritize shipping to people on this list first.”
Discussion about this post