I view this entire thing through an extremely simple, reductive lens:

Rebble effectively had free reign on this ecosystem for years, and could have at any time decided to try and capitalize on it further. They still can! But instead they're apparently interested in rent seeking while Core makes real headway.

It's clear that Eric and Core want to make something now. It's not clear what Rebble wants, but it's clear they are feeling left out. That obviously sucks but it's clear from what both sides are saying that Core has been trying to involve Rebble in their efforts. That's certainly noble and I'm not sure others would do the same.

Would Eric be able to do this all without Rebble? Lots of commenters have been saying "no" but I'm skeptic. I was an early Pebble user. I stopped using it before they went bust, and while I was aware of Rebble, there was nothing compelling there for me. It's neat that they have maintained a copy of the original watchfaces but beyond that I don't perceive a ton of value. I don't like the subscription fee. I'm sad they never took a serious crack at making a Rebble watch.

I hope everyone finds a way forward, together, but I'm not optimistic.

Summarizing the dispute, for anyone interested:

Rebble's "one red line" is "there has to be a future for Rebble in there." They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out. There's also emphasis on "our work," "we built this," "we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." They feel Eric isn't acknowledging where his infrastructure came from.

Core Devices' thing is explicitly stating concern about relying on a third party (Rebble) for "critical services" his customers depend on. If "Rebble leadership changes their mind," they can't guarantee customer experience. They wants the app store archive to be "freely available" and "not controlled by one organization." They don't want to need "permission from Rebble" before building features (like free weather, voice-to-text) that might compete with Rebble's paid services. The fundamental fear seems to be business risk: being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.

Neither side seems to trust the other's long-term intentions, creating an impasse where both feel existentially threatened by the other's preferred arrangement.

My take: I bought a watch in 2014. After the pebble 2 duo black fiasco (they ran out of stock, offered a white instead which I accepted 2 weeks ago, never shipped, and have ghosted my emails asking for shipping timelines.) I had high hopes, but given the messy interaction with the OSS world I'm considering cancelling my order for the duo and time two.

The mentioned blog post (https://rebble.io/2025/11/17/core-devices-keeps-stealing-our...) is a pretty great example why using Discord as your main communication tool for an open source project is the wrong choice. The only way to read about the decisions ("Shortly after, Core forked PebbleOS1 away from public maintainership. Back in June, they said that they would merge back periodically2;") is to read the manual transcript they added to the blog post.

This is a bit of a what-if, but I had a Pebble watch back then and was considering trying to make an app for it. The idea that, if I had succeeded and published the app, that Rebble would be claiming ownership over my binary and threatening legal action against the original Pebble creator, to be really quite ridiculous and affronting.

Recent and related:

Core Devices keeps stealing our work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960893 - Nov 2025 (110 comments)

this part of the response doesn't pass the smell test for me:

> Accusation 4: ‘[Eric] scraped our app store, in violation of the agreement that we reached with him previously’

> Here’s what happened. I wanted to highlight some of my favourite watchfaces on the Pebble Appstore. Last Monday Nov 10, after I put my kids to sleep and between long calls with factories in Asia, I started building a webapp to help me quickly go through Pebble Appstore and decide which were my top picks.

> Let me be crystal clear - my little webapp did not download apps or ‘scrape’ anything from Rebble. The webapp displayed the name of each watchface and screenshots and let me click on my favs. I used it to manually look through 6000 watchfaces with my own eyes. I still have 7,000 to go. Post your server logs, they will match up identically to the app I (well…Claude) wrote (source code here)

so it wasn't "scraping"...it was just a vibe-coded webapp that made at least 6,000 requests to Rebble's servers in a short period of time? possibly more, depending on how many intermediate versions of the app he tested, and possibly many more, if one of those intermediate versions had a vibe-coded "feature" like prefetching a bunch of data for performance reasons?

he agreed not to scrape their services. and then scraped their services. and his excuse seems to boil down to "but I was doing it for a cool reason"

and he tosses in completely unrelated details about putting his kids to bed and having long calls with factories in Asia. those seem calculated to make him sound more relatable - an honest, hardworking, humble family man.

this seems like a relatively minor point in the overall dispute, but if he's unwilling or unable to take any responsibility there, it doesn't boost my confidence that he's being honest about the rest of it.

Ignoring all else, did private conversation participants consent to their messages being posted publicly in this post?

If you're looking for an alternative to all of this, the BangleJS v2 is both cheaper and more hackable than the Pebble watches. It doesn't tick all of the same boxes, but it's performed well for me over the last 6 months.

Here's what it offers:

* Screen is fully visible under direct sunlight

* With the screen always on the battery lasts me well over a week

* Heart rate monitor

* EXTREMELY hackable, everything can be hacked on with JS, even the launcher you're using for apps

* 108 Euros shipped to the US

* Fully supported by GadgetBridge (open source mobile app)

https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2

The amount of internet drama a smartwatch that stopped being produced ten years ago generates even to this day is truly incredible. Nothing that's happening here is so important as to make enemies, and the fact that Core Devices even wants to use the open source app store and is willing to pay for it should have been an immediate "Yes, that's incredible, lets make it work" from Rebble. So what if they get bought by Fitbit or go closed source? Rebble will just be back to where they were before. That's the beauty of open source; it doesn't need them, it just needs people who are interested in the project.

It's a followup on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960893 from a few hours ago

If nobody trusts either party to keep up their end of the bargain, why not solve it with licensing?

Isn't this the exact point of copyleft licenses?

Relicense PebbleOS as GPL, relicense Rebble as AGPL.

Problem is then solved, no?

As long as I can get my data from my watch into Home Assistant and maybe Google Health, I'll keep my preorder. Hopefully this drama gets resolved but I never used any of the apps on my soon to be replaced Fitbit.

> I disagree. I’m working hard to keep the Pebble ecosystem open source. I believe the contents of the Pebble Appstore should be freely available and not controlled by one organization.

I hate to say this but I have to agree with Eric. I want to side with Rebble But they are clearly misguided. The goal should not be to have an ongoing revenue stream for Rebble.

The goals should be

If and when Eric sells out again, there is a way for

1. all pebble and core devices to continue to get updates somehow (Rebble or otherwise)

2. all apps and metadata will continue to be available somehow (Rebble or otherwise)

The otherwise is key here. If someone wants to not use Rebble, they should be able to do that.

Rebble is not the end goal. Core is not the end goal. The users are.

> My goal this time round is to make it sustainable.

Was I the only one to get excited when I saw "time round" in a sentence written on Eric's blog? It took a second for me to realize this had nothing to do with the amazing PTR.

What an entirely avoidable lose-lose bust-up.

Why is Rebble so set on protecting this code that would have an incredibly limited shelf life if not for the new Pebble devices? It seems like an incredibly short-sighted fight against someone who (legally) owes them 0 unless they can substantiate the allegation that Pebble stole their code (theirs not being code they themselves scraped after Pebble's initial failure).

This is a pretty predictable response. The problem is, this is a classic "he said, she said" situation. So it's pretty tough to tell whom you should believe, unless you are close enough to the situation to see it first-hand. Clearly someone is not playing nice, but it's not clear which party that is. Sucks for the user community though, either way.

For some additional context, the screenshotted Rebble board member has commented here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/1p0huk5/pebble_rebb...

Looks like they were not consulted by Eric before this post.

Now I am glad I didn't order a new one. Drama everywhere nowadays.

Interesting read! It’s great to see how the Pebble community and Rebble are keeping the platform alive, showing the power of user-driven innovation and dedication.