If it can be brought back, I’d pay whatever is necessary, and I’d love to contribute now that I’ve spent many years doing embedded firmware development professionally!

I was originally pissed that Pebble never sold replacement parts (actually I still am), but at least this hardware has been holding up extremely well.

I still have this email in my inbox from 2011, after a posting here on HN about your launch:

Subject: You bought the first one! BODY: Congratulations...

Great to see this happening again, best of luck!

It's an absolutely shame that Pebble was so innovative and functional, but couldn't reach mass market. But, I am extremely excited and happy that the Pebble team can start it again. I don't like Google for many things, but, I am grateful that the open-sourced PebbleOS. What a joyous day!

After my Pebble I tried an e-ink "Watchy" from SQFMI (https://watchy.sqfmi.com/) thinking that the battery life would be great but the battery only lasted a few days.

I've been wearing a Bangle 2 (https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2) which feels closest to recreating my Pebble. It has super long battery life and feels a lot like my Pebble did, but doesn't have the polish of the pebble UI and animations.

Can't wait to get a new Pebble!

I vividly remember spending days fine tuning the heuristics of a simple step detection algorithm in the first watchface where I thought “seeing your daily step count next to time sure is awesome”. And later, tens of thousands of people thought so as well - this was one of the signs what the health-tracking wrist device is about to become.

It was incredible that even the first model allowed you to run a 30 samples per second accelerometer sampling and classifying the movement, 24/7, and still lasted days. No other watch offers a similar level of hackability.

And as the time progressed, Pebble became the first platform to get Weathergraph - my graphical weather watchface.

Weathergraph was then ported to Garmin (as Pebble shut down), and then to Apple Watch widget (as it became a capable platform with the introduction of standalone watch-apps in watchOS 6), and then to iOS app & widget, where it now lets me live a life of indie developer, after a serie of corporate design/PM/dev jobs.

Thank you for that, Eric & Pebble team.

I still keep the developer edition Pebble with my name printed on the back (great touch!) in my shelf and heart, and will always remember Jon Barlow, one of the best and most helpful developer advocates I ever encountered.

And kudos to the whole dev team. The watch and companion app was rock stable, always staying connected, the calendar always being in sync, watch apps installed quickly and reliably - the things that 10x larger companies struggled with for years were nailed here almost from day one.

Godspeed!

PS: What a mishap to shut the company down shortly after a release of Pebble 2. It nailed the experience of a lightweight watch, with the most contrasty BW reflective screen I have seen, and buttery smooth animations (while Garmin still renders menus in like 8-10 fps on their MIP screens 10 years later). So small and lightweight, I’d love everyone to try it on, and compare with 2024 smartwatches.

I hope that element of it will continue to exist as-is on these new ones? I mention this because Bluetooth is still generally speaking very meh.

I tried keeping my pebble alive for so long even after it's demise, I bought 2 Pebble Time when a few were still available on ebay.

I remember writing my first integration from scratch to control room lamp using my Pebble watch. I hacked it together by getting a wifi socket and programming a web-server hosted on my raspberry-pi.

Here is the DEMO video I made 8 years ago: https://vikashbajaj.com/pebble.mp4

My pebble watch would call an app on my phone, in turn the app would make a request to the webserver and the webserver would then make a query to the wifi socket to toggle it.

It lagged a bit but it got the job done. I could connect anything to these wifi sockets and control any appliance with my Pebble time. This was before hackable smart hubs were a thing.

https://github.com/codaris/pebble-cpp

It might even become relevant again!

Pebble had an ingenious design for its watch apps. Despite the watch having a limited processor and even more limited RAM, it could accommodate several apps, each boasting a lot of capability.

Each Pebble app was comprised of two components: one that resided on the watch and another on the phone. Users could install these apps from Pebble's dedicated app store, and the same app was compatible with both iOS and Android. Pebble brilliantly bypassed Apple's app install restrictions and cross-platform compatibility challenges by executing the on-phone portion within the platform's JavaScript engine.

If you wanted to create a weather application, the phone component of the app would be written in JavaScript and retrieve weather updates from the Internet, which would then be conveyed to the watch's C-based app for display. Watch apps could also have a settings page that was implemented in HTML.

I have always been impressed by of the cleverness and simplicity of this design.

However...

If you want to make it TRULY HACKABLE as you claim, you will not encumber it with cloud dependencies like you did last time. Let ME self host my own Pebble server if I choose. Go ahead and default to your servers and sell services and whatever, but let me host my own and switch the base URL to my own domain, preferably with open source software and simple APIs, without requiring me to go through your servers.

That way, even if this attempt also doesn't pan out, those of us willing to do the work will at least still have the functionality we want. I get the whole VC "lock them into required cloud services for life so we can make endless subscription revenue" model, but it's absolutely corrupt.

And, Eric, I know you know that - you have a hacker's heart. Please listen to it.

The software UX of the Pebble was on point, and the animations surprisingly smooth for such a device. I'm still convinced that after all there years, the Timeline UI is unrivaled.

I'm eager to see what you'll come out with :)

- Good accuracy sleep tracking

- GPS ( I know this uses up a lot of battery but could be off by default)

- Self-hostable servers. (I'm a very privacy conscious person, and also I don't want to be bound to an ecosystem that might disappear one day)

I'm gonna keep an eye on this project. It really looks very interesting. I hope it gets far.

Basically what Whoop is doing with their strap - but minus the subscription model. I know a ton of people who tried the whoop but felt it was extremely pricey and didn't have the accuracy of an apple watch.

I would be happy to pay ~$400-500 up front for hardware that integrates with Apple Health and provides solid, reliable health tracking without a need for a subscription.

And by health/fitness - features expected would be sleep tracking, activity (gps), heart rate, Sp02, skin temperature sensors, fall detection. Then secondarily - additional things like ECG/EKG, apnea, AFib detection

The in-accuracy of some of the devices in the market is why I still choose to remain with my Apple Watch.

This youtube channel may help understand a consumer's perspective on health accuracy - https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist

A better "thank you" to Google would be to direct people to Fitbit.

That the OS has been open sourced is great news (though it's sad it was on GitHub... and hopefully other communities around Pebble will spring up outside of platforms (article only mentions Discord and Reddit)).

I think trying to reach "mass market" - or specifically, the market of people who are into fitness and sportsball - is largely what killed them. I'd like to believe that they could've catered to existing userbase a bit longer, grew a little more slowly but sustainably by doubling down on an idea of an ergonomic, battery-efficient, programmable smartwatch extension - a tool, not a toy.

Alas, maybe the whole thing was over once Apple, and Samsung got their marketing wheels spinning.

I got rug pulled by "the pebble team" the first time, leaving me with 3 watches they effectively bricked.. Not gonna sign up for that again.

(I got a refund on my last Pebble order. When the money showed up I drunk-ebayed a 2nd hand ~40 year old mechanical watch. I now have about 20 wind up or mechanical auto winding watches. I do have a few chinese ~$40 "smart watches" that do an OK job of notifications on my wrist, and a somewhat questionable job of heartrate and blood pressure monitoring, and one that produces totally random numbers for blood glucose reading whether it's on my wrist or not. I almost never wear any of those. I've got a Watchy kit, and open source epaper ESP32 watch, but I've had it maybe a year and haven't found the enthusiasm to assemble it.)

Even in retrospect it seems weird that it failed the way it did.

So if they can bring contactless payments to their new Pebble they have my attention, otherwise it's useless to me.

I've written my own watchface and a couple of other apps and made changes to a number of existing apps, it's really simple because you can always test your code changes live on the watch while keeping it on your wrist. There's an IDE that connects to it using Bluetooth and the code can be modified during runtime

Lthere's also a great community of hackers and tinkerers that steadily improve the watch.

It might not have the same polish as the pebble had, but it makes it up in hackability. I can only recommend getting a banglejs2 (battery life is also pretty great, I get about 10 days with regular use)

My only wish is for an easily serviceable battery.

Can anyone confirm?

I don't think I was a particularly early user of Weathergraph - but when I finally had to retire my Pebble Time I only considered platforms that had your watchface.

Thanks very much for the attention to detail!

Yes, it will lock out people for whom that price is unacceptable, but now more than ever your real customer is serious hackers, and we are collectively more than fed up with the cloud and subscriptions. Framework and Nabu Casa need to be your models here, because your customers are overwhelmingly their customers.