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https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/25/pebble_eink_smartwatch_open_source/ [theregister.com]

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.
Pebble's newly opened hardware and software

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.

Much of the impetus for this transition seems to stem from Migicovsky's experience with the prior collapse of Pebble and a desire to prevent customers from being left without the ability to use their hardware if the unthinkable were to happen again.

"There wasn't that much that the community could do to make improvements to the watches when the company ceased to exist," Migicovsky explained in the video, noting that neither the mobile app nor the OS was made open source after Fitbit acquired Pebble and shut down operations.

"The impetus for this Pebble relaunch really was that Google open sourced Pebble's operating system," Migicovsky explained, thanking Google for the move. "This wouldn't have happened if that hadn't happened."
Pebble app store expands amid controversy

The Pebble community has been in a bit of an uproar of late due to conflict between Migicovsky and the Rebble crew, which earlier this month accused the Pebble founder of stealing its work.

"We'd already agreed to give Core a license to our database to build a recommendation engine on," Rebble said in a blog post last week. "Then, Eric said that he instead demanded that we give them all of the data that we've curated, unrestricted, for him to do whatever he'd like with."

Instead of meeting with Rebble as they had asked, the group accused Migicovsky of scraping its servers and stealing their data regardless, which Migicovsky claims is incorrect. Rebble has since backpedaled on some of its arguments - particularly that it owns the content hosted on the Rebble app store, which has been the source of Pebble apps and hacks since the formal service went offline.

"We added the words 'collected by, maintained by, hosted by, and served by' … to more accurately reflect our original intent," Rebble noted in an update to its blog post after the Pebble community hit back at claims of ownership.

The reason for the community outrage has to do with the source of all the apps and watch faces on the Rebble store, Migicovsky explained on Monday.

"When Fitbit pulled the plug on the original Pebble Appstore, the Rebble Foundation downloaded a copy of all the apps and faces, and set up a new web service to let users of the old Pebble app continue to download and use watchfaces," Migicovsky wrote.

While it's great that Rebble pulled that info, it's definitely not theirs, which Rebble has essentially admitted to with that blog update. Regardless, it won't really matter for much longer, as getting apps on a Pebble device, new, old, or home-built using all the new open source elements, will soon be doable through the mobile app in a manner similar to open source package management.

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.

= Links in article:
https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-watch-software-is-now-100percent-open-source [ericmigi.com]
https://www.theregister.com/2014/12/02/pebble_the_brilliant_stealth_wearable_that_might_be_a_winner/ [theregister.com]
https://www.theregister.com/2015/07/22/review_pebble_time_smart_watch/ [theregister.com]
https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/08/the_vulture_capitalists_killed_pebble/?page=1 [theregister.com]
https://rebble.io/ [rebble.io]
https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/01/google_buys_fitbit/ [theregister.com]
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/01/see-code-that-powered-pebble-smartwatches.html [googleblog.com]
http://github.com/coredevices/hardware [github.com]
https://github.com/coredevices/pebbleos [github.com]
https://github.com/coredevices/mobileapp [github.com]
https://rebble.io/2025/11/17/core-devices-keeps-stealing-our-work.html?utm_source=syndication [rebble.io]
https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-rebble-and-a-path-forward#our-plan-for-the-fut [ericmigi.com]

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