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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Eric Migicovsky wants to ensure Pebble can't be killed again, and DIYers benefit most:

Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch with a tumultuous history, is making a move sure to please the DIY enthusiasts that make up the bulk of its fans: Its entire software stack is now fully open source, and key hardware design files are available too.

Pebble creator Eric Migicovsky announced the move on Monday in a blog post and video detailing the changes his reborn Pebble watchmaking firm has undertaken, and they're considerable.

For those unfamiliar with the saga of Pebble, the budget e-ink smartwatches are Migicovsky's brainchild, and first became widely available in 2013. Color models came later, but by 2016 the company had been acquired by Fitbit, which canned hardware sales and put the Pebble software ecosystem out to pasture. Support for the devices disappeared with the Fitbit acquisition too, leaving independent tinkerers operating under the name Rebble to take up support for the devices of their own accord.

Fitbit was later acquired by Google, which open sourced Pebble's operating system in January 2025. Migicovsky launched a new company, Core Devices, in March, with plans to release two new Pebble watches. Google's trademark on the Pebble brand had expired, Migicovsky told us, and he now owns it under a new filing.

First off, all the electrical and mechanical schematics for Pebble's one currently available device, the black-and-white Pebble 2 Duo, are now available on Github for anyone to tinker with or to build their own Pebble 2 Duo.

The schematics for the Core Devices' other new watch, the yet-to-be-released Pebble Time 2, aren't available on Github, naturally. That device is going to begin shipping sometime early next year, Migicovsky said in his blog post, but he told us in an email that he hasn't decided whether to publish the schematics for that device yet.

Things are getting just as open on the software side, with the entirety of PebbleOS and the mobile apps used to push notifications and manage the device on iOS and Android both now available on Github for your own compilation and modification purposes, joining the Pebble SDK and other dev tools in open source software land.

Migicovsky noted in his video that he hopes the opening of PebbleOS to anyone who wants to tinker with it will lead to a new generation of products, both watches and beyond.

"I am excited that there may be people crazy enough to take Pebble OS and make it work in other products or other watches," Migicovsky said.

[...] Later this week, once Google and Apple approve the change, the Pebble mobile apps will have multiple app feeds that users can subscribe to. Additionally, anyone can create their own feed, Migicovsky explained. Core is also opening its own Pebble Appstore feed that will be packed up to Archive.org daily, Migicovsky added.

"This makes us not reliant on our servers, and at any point if our servers were to disappear you could download a copy of that, stand up your own Pebble app store feed, and continue to use it," the Pebble creator said. "We hope this sets a standard for openness. We encourage all app store feeds to publish a freely and publicly available archive of all the apps on their feed."

Monetization features are also being added to the Pebble app so that developers can make money off their creations, Migicovsky explained.

Whether this new model of openness will be enough to take Pebble from being a footnote in the wearable space now dominated by Apple, Samsung and others is far from a sure thing, but hey: for those that want more control over their device, you can't get better than this new generation of entirely open source hardware and software.

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