Feb 16, 2026 • by Joshua Wise

Nominate yourself for the Board of Directors!

Hi, there! For those of you who have been following the Rebble Dev Forum, you might have noticed that we’re gearing up for elections for the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors! I’m writing this blog post to tell you that self-nominations for the Board are now open for the next two weeks, and that you (yes, you, dear reader!) should run for a seat on the Board!

As many of you know, the Rebble Foundation is the non-profit organization that keeps Rebble running. The general idea of a non-profit is that, instead of shareholders, investors, or owners, we have bylaws and a Board of Directors that governs how we do our work. Since we don’t have shareholders, the Board is responsible solely to Rebble’s mission, rather than trying to make money for anyone in particular. In order for that to happen effectively, we depend on everyday members of the Rebble community to step up and guide that work!

So if you’re interested in that kind of thing, well, this is the post that has more information for you – read on.

What’s the election process?

I’m glad you asked! This year, all five seats on the Board are up for election (though the election rules guarantee that at least two members of the previous Board will carry over, so that we preserve some continuity). For more details on exactly how it works, you can read all the nitty-gritty details, but in short, here are the key timeframes:

• Starting today, Monday, February 16th, 2026: Board nominations are open! Prospective members have two weeks to nominate themselves by submitting the self-nomination form.
• Sunday, March 1st, 2026, end of day anywhere-on-Earth: Nominations close.
• Monday, March 2nd, 2026: Voting begins! Every eligible Rebble user (that is to say, a Rebble user that created their account before the cutoff) can submit a ballot, ranking Board candidates in order. (More info on that soon!)
• Monday, March 9th, 2026, end of day anywhere-on-Earth: Voting ends. Votes are tallied by an instant-runoff vote, according to the election rules.
• Thursday, March 12th, 2026: The current Board meets to ratify the election results. Results are announced immediately afterwards, and the new Board’s term is effective immediately!

What does a Board member do?

OK, here’s where I get to a little bit of opinion rather than unshakeable truth. But in my mind, there’s three major tasks for a Board member, with roughly equal importance.

1. Keep the lights on. There are day to day, boring, administrative tasks involved in running a non-profit. The services that we currently run have to keep running. There are external entities that we have to interface with. We have to pay our taxes and our cloud bills. Elections have to run. There are not a lot of these things, but they exist! They don’t just happen on their own; people on the Board makes them happen, and will have to divide up this work.

2. Dream big things. The whole point of what we are doing with Rebble is to believe that things can be better than they are. We have to dream big! If we had all the time and money that we wanted to spend on this kind of thing, what could we do? What’s the best possible option for all things Pebble? In my mind, you can’t pick the best thing to reasonably do without dreaming of what could be better – and some of the best ideas that have been had in this space (say, a Pebble itself! or RWS!) seemed impossible to begin with. The Board is the guiding force for where Rebble goes, and has the responsibility for seeing not just today but far into the future.

3. Do realistic things. On the other hand, even when we dream big, it’s still inevitably true that we’re constrained by what we have in front of us. The Board’s responsibility is also to make Rebble the best we can, right here – and that means to pick some projects that the Board can reasonably accomplish in its term, commit to them, and make them happen. Members of the Board don’t have to be the experts who do the work themselves – a great example of that is our recent work on microPebble on iOS, where we amplified our capabilities by paying an external firm! But the Board’s job is to take little baby steps all the time, and make things happen.

Of course, this is just my opinion. What the actual job of the next Board is, is entirely up to the next Board to decide! And, as a result, the amount of time commitment that should be expected on the Board also would vary. But my suspicion is that the things that I have listed above are a few hours of work a week – say, 2 to 5 hours, depending on what’s going on – and less than that may not be serving the constituent body of Rebblers adequately.

One thing that I want to note is that previous Board have set guidance for future Boards, but it’s not set in stone. If you agree with the above, I of course encourage you to run. But even if you disagree with the above, or you disagree with choices that the Board has made in the past, I still encourage you to run! Non-profits run better when they are lead by people who care about them – and, inherently, people who care bring a variety of ideas to the table, and not all of them agree with each other. In my mind, it’s more important that a future Board member cares about the importance of Rebble as an entity than that they agree with me on everything!

How do I run?

Ah, now we’re on to the fun part. To be a candidate for the Rebble Foundation Board election, you need to submit a self-nomination form by the end of the day, Sunday, March 1st. On the self-nomination form, you’ll be asked to fill in a few things:

• How should we name you? Tell people what name you’d prefer for people to call you by, and what your online presences are; list any relevant usernames, etc., that Rebblers might know you by.
• Who are you, and what are some of the main contributions you’ve made to the Rebble community? In 500 words or fewer, give us a quick introduction to yourself! How have you been connected to the Pebbleverse in the past? What do people know you for, and what skills will you bring to the Board?
• If you are elected, what do you intend to do in your capacity as a Foundation board member? In 500 words or fewer, tell us how you’d use your term on the Board! Why should Rebblers vote for you? What’s your dream for what Rebble should become? What do you think the Board ought reasonably get done in a year, and how do you plan to make it happen?
• Do you have any potential conflicts of interest with your responsibilities as a Foundation board member? It’s not in the slightest bit disqualifying if you do, but Rebblers should know what other obligations you might have – and how you plan to manage them.

These nomination items will appear publicly next to your name on the ballot for Rebblers to decide on their next Board.

To get your creative juices flowing, I’ll give you an example of what I’d write about myself if I were running for this term. (I’m not, since I’ve got an enormous amount of stuff going on in my personal life over the next few months and should probably sit this term out! But fear not, I’ll still be around the Pebbleverse, and I’ll hope to run for a future Board when I have time to give it my all.)

What’s your name? Joshua Wise; you might know me as joshua or @jwise0 on Discord, or @jwise on GitHub.

Who are you and what are your main contributions? I’ve been around since the very early days of Pebble, in the #pebble channel on Freenode (RIP)! I helped set up the early Rebble Web Services infrastructure, and I’ve been maintaining it for the last 5 or 6 years. I built a bunch of the admin console for Rebble Web Services. In years past, I worked with ginge on the early RebbleOS efforts, and a test board I designed in 2019 was the first non-Pebble hardware to successfully run a PebbleOS watchface; once PebbleOS became open source, I also wrote the first prototype of PebbleOS on Core 2 Duo for Core Devices. Recently, I’ve been mostly doing administrative work for the Foundation as the Treasurer.

What do you intend to do as a Board member? My biggest goal for a 2026 Board term is to continue down the path of having a sustainable, independent Pebble ecosystem. Concretely, there are two things I would focus my energy and the Foundation’s resources on: getting microPebble into a state where it can be a daily driver, bringing PebbleOS back to life on legacy devices (snowy, etc), and continuing to support the community’s work on beautiful visual design for Pebble apps. (I have dreams about having new independent Pebble hardware, too! But I imagine that those aren’t a near-term project.)

Do you have any conflicts of interest? My day job is as half of Accelerated Tech, Inc., which has previously done contract work both for Rebble and for Core Devices. Accelerated Tech is not currently engaged with either of those clients. I would recuse myself from any vote involving Accelerated Tech.

Of course, you don’t have to agree with all of my plans! And although I’ve been around the Pebbleverse approximately forever, there is no expectation that a Board member need have been around as long as I have (indeed, I would welcome seeing some fresh faces on the Board!). But the thing that really matters is that you have to nominate yourself before the deadline.

I’m really looking forward to seeing people running for Board positions. It’s been such a joy to see the Rebble developer community take shape again over the past few years. From the bottom of my heart, thanks to all of the people who have been here to make it happen!

Yours,
joshua

Jan 21, 2026 • by Joshua Wise

A peek into the future: microPebble on iOS

In my previous blog post about Rebble’s finances this year, I alluded to the idea of Rebble commissioning a port of Matej Drobnič (matejdro)’s microPebble to iOS. I promised I’d write more about that soon – and luckily for you, soon is now! The most important piece of information is, of course, “yes! we’re doing it!”, but I have a fair bit more to say about it, including: why we think microPebble is important; what we’re doing to make microPebble possible on other platforms; and where we want to go with microPebble in the future. I think it’s very exciting, and I hope you will too!

What is microPebble, and why is it important?

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, microPebble is an alternative, open source, Pebble companion app that Matej Drobnič started work on back in September. In Matej’s words, it’s a “small scrappy app […] with the functional UI and features [he] cares about.” microPebble is built on Core’s libpebble3, which in turn, is built on the libpebblecommon that we sponsored the development of many years ago.

Matej started this work before Core Devices open sourced their CoreApp; even though CoreApp is now open source, though, we don’t think that microPebble is irrelevant! CoreApp has a focus on all of Core Devices’s products, not just their PebbleOS family of watches, and it exists to support their ecosystem (and it should!). We think that the Pebble world also deserves to have a vendor-neutral app for all sorts of PebbleOS devices past, present, and future.

We think that the Pebble world should have an app that supports many different players in the Pebble ecosystem with many different goals. For instance, obviously, we shouldn’t expect Core Devices to have to support other manufacturers’ watches in their app! But the Pebble world should definitely have an app that allows other people to make their own watches, after all.

And, of course, we’d love to have an app with first-party-quality support for Rebble Web Services. We’d like to continue to add features, without having to depend on anyone else to implement them – for instance, we recently rebuilt support for shared pins in the Timeline, and, of course, we’d like to continue to extend how Bobby (Rebble’s voice assistant) can be useful.

There are many other things that we’d love to have in an app of our own – things that don’t need to be in scope for CoreApp. We’d like to be able to publish to F-Droid, for instance – and it could be exciting to try to use microPebble’s Kotlin MP base to try to build a Pebble desktop app.

More than anything, we’d like for microPebble to be the start of a community-owned platform that’s designed to last far into the future – and we’ve been thinking about how to make that happen.

Joining forces with Intent

Back in September, the Rebble Board reached out to the team at Intent. We saw the work that was happening on microPebble, but for the time being, Matej only had development access to Android – and since it was his own personal project, of course it made sense that he’d prioritize devices that he had! We explained why we thought it was important to have our own mobile app, and we asked the Intent team to evaluate the state of microPebble, and how it could help us meet our goal.

The Intent team helped us flesh out what we were looking for – we were hoping to come up with a spiritual successor to the original Rebble mobile app, Cobble. They came up with a few avenues to explore:

• What would it take to modernize the old Cobble Flutter framework to use libpebble3?
• What would the level of effort be to bring up microPebble on iOS?
• And, once CoreApp became open source, would it be better to use CoreApp, microPebble, or Cobble as a base?

We decided to work together for a few weeks to have them do some research, and come up with some conclusions on each of these paths. They looked at each of the options, and found that microPebble was most likely to meet our requirements – and then, to our surprise, in the remaining time, the Intent team did not just estimate the effort, but even better than that, they brought microPebble to life on iOS by rewriting the UI with Compose MP!

This was obviously very exciting. I solidly had a big smile on my face when I paired a watch to my daily driver iPhone using microPebble!

What’s next to do?

Of course, this is still just the beginning, and there is a lot of work to do before microPebble-on-iOS becomes the Cobble dream. We’re still working on coming up with a roadmap for what we’d like to prioritize in terms of next features! We expect that we’ll be posting some in the Rebble itself! category on the Rebble Dev Forum. For now, here are a handful of things that we’re thinking about, in the short term and in the long term:

• Obviously, we should get this merged back into Matej’s microPebble base. We have a development branch right now as a proof of concept, but we should structure it so that we can put up some PRs!
• Also, there are a few changes to libpebble3 itself that are needed. We need to upstream these changes.
• The obvious next thing to do is to make sure that iOS is at feature parity with Android. A few screens are missing, and such; we’ll have to improve that (and, while we’re at it, probably come up with a feature matrix in the README for what works on Android, what works on iOS, and what works on both!).
• If we’re going to sponsor development on microPebble, we’d like to get it to the point of using it as a daily driver in a RWS world – and, for me, that means being able to use Bobby! So we’ll have to itemize what’s missing to get us there – and then start ticking off the list. (Even in the time since I started writing this post, fishy, on Discord, has been doing a lot of work recently on getting app store support up and running on microPebble-for-Android!)
• And, finally, once microPebble reaches a baseline level of functionality, we’d like to start skinning the UI using some of the Cobble Figma designs (I still love that art style!).

We’d like to continue to work with the Intent team, and from the Rebble side, we’ll continue to fund work on microPebble (by Intent, and by others who are capable!). My thought was that the Intent team can be active participants in the community, as peers to other developers – and that they can use their experience in building modern mobile applications to set us up for success by building scaffolding that the community can develop on top of. For instance, we’d like to have Intent start to build out a visual component library and prepare some best-practice examples for how to implement some of the Cobble UI designs – and then other people in the community who might have less experience (maybe even hardware engineers like me??) can continue to implement more screens on top of the framework that they’ll build for us.

There’s a lot to do, and it’ll be fun to see how it shakes out! But it is very exciting to see the initial progress, and one of the fun parts about this project is that we can do all of the planning and coordination work in the open. I’m looking forward to seeing it come to life!

You can start playing with it today

Originally, I had planned to wait to write this blog post until we got the initial proof of concept merged back into Matej’s upstream. I still need to spend some time sifting through diffs! But the more I became busy with other tasks, the more I realized that you all deserved to see it sooner :-)

So, if you want, you can start playing with microPebble-on-iOS today, and you can build it yourself! The Intent team provided us with a proof-of-concept repo, with iOS build instructions in the README – to get started, just take a look at github/pebble-dev/micropebble-ios-poc. Clone it with submodules, follow the build instructions, and you, too can have your iPhone talking to your watch!

And one of the cool things about doing all our work in the open is that we can show you how the sausage is made. The Intent team put together a great summary report on the work they did for us, and if you’re curious, I’ve uploaded it here so you can read it.

Obviously this is very early stages, and I can’t imagine this is going to remain in this repository in the long term; we’d like to unify it back with the microPebble repository, and probably these changes will get rebased as individual PRs on top of microPebble (and we have work to do, given that there’s been work recently on the non-Compose UI for microPebble!). So don’t count on that particular repo being terribly long-lived.

As always, we’d love to hear your input on what we should do next. Feel free to post about it in the Rebble forum, or come chat with us on Discord!

Dec 27, 2025 • by Joshua Wise

Rebble Foundation Finances 2025 #Wrapped!

Hi everyone! It’s me, Joshua, your friendly Treasurer for the Rebble Foundation. We promised earlier this year that we were going to find ways to be more transparent with how Rebble is run – so I wanted to provide an update on our finances for this year, so you can see what we’re spending money on, where it’s going, and how we’re doing!

Anyway, I just finished the QuickBooks review for December, and I am happy to say that our financial situation is decently strong. So first off, here’s a table of our cash flow for this calendar year. (There are some notes below.) Our fiscal year closes in June, so this isn’t a formal ‘annual report’. But given this is coming in December, it obviously is a #Wrapped!

Foundation Financial Overview

Rebble Foundation Financial Report
Starting Cash on Hand		$508,407
Income		+$87,457
	Subscription revenue	$82,054
	Interest income	$5,403
Program Expenditures		-$37,320
	Initial port of NimBLE to PebbleOS (Hexxeh)	$18,000
	MicroPebble iOS initial work (Intent sp. z o.o.)	$11,000
	NimBLE debug assistance for Snowy (Codecoup sp. z o.o.)	$7,000
	pebble.nix Apple Silicon hardware subsidy (Ruby)	$820
	Hackathon #002	$500
Administrative Expenses		-$30,138
	Legal fees for Foundation startup (Bodman PLC)	$14,068
	Federal tax	$11,955
	Accountant fees (Curcuru & Associates CPA)	$2,800
	Software: G Suite; 1Password; QuickBooks Online; Acodei; Zendesk; Figma	$1,315
Cost of Goods Sold		-$22,452
	The Weather Company	$8,652
	GCP	$6,585
	Honeycomb	$6,435
	Algolia	$420
	AWS	$360
Ending Cash on Hand		$509,315
	2025 Profit / Loss	+$908

Notes

• These data were collected from January 1, 2025, to December 25, 2025. Our fiscal year actually ends in June but I really wanted to get a report out for the end of the year, and most people don’t think in fiscal years anyway, so there you have it.
• Figures are not fully final (various service fees / bank fees / etc. are not included in this report).
• Heck yes you read that right! MicroPebble iOS initial work! More on that in a blog post soon.
• The ending cash on hand does not quite add up because there are outstanding liabilities to GCP / Honeycomb / etc that were accounted above. However, the cash on hand was taken directly from our bank account numbers, and does represent our real position.
• Rebble Foundation is a non-profit in the State of Michigan, but it is not an IRS-registered tax-exempt non-profit under code 501(c). What this means is that we do not pay tax to the State of Michigan, but we do pay United States Federal tax. Our non-profit structure ensures that no individual people have an ownership share in Rebble, and that governance happens in accordance with the by-laws, rather than in the interests of maximizing profits for shareholders.

Treasurer’s Report

Hey, these numbers are not too bad! Here are some of my interpretations of the above.

One of the big concerns that I’ve had for a long time is that we have not been spending enough to benefit the community – as you can see by our $500,000 in cash on hand that we started and finished the year with. (We’ve been running Rebble for quite a while now!) To that end, I had hoped that we would not turn a profit this year, and we’d start spending that down. We didn’t quite achieve that, but I’m not too upset about where we landed: hitting break-even roughly within 1% on a ~$90,000 operating budget is pretty good.

Similarly, I am encouraged that we are starting to ramp our spending up on Pebble-related projects, rather than just web services. This year, we spent roughly an equal amount on contributors inside our community, and also on engaging external services to perform tasks that we haven’t been able to do on our own. I’d like to continue that trend into 2026 – we should be using our resources both to extend the reach of what we can do, and to reward people inside the Rebble community who are doing cool things that contribute to the Pebble movement!

We spent lot of money this year on administrative tasks – we incurred nearly $14,000 in legal expenses. This is not a surprise – setting up a legal entity is expensive and time-consuming! I expect that next year we will spend less money on those tasks, and we can use that additional funding to invest in our community.

I believe that our financial position is strong. For 2026, from the Treasurer’s perspective, I have the following recommendations for the rest of the Board:

• We should continue to increase our investment in the community in 2026 by increasing our program expenditures. I recommend a target of at least $60,000 in program expenditures, with a target of splitting this approximately equally between recipients inside the community and external resources to augment our capabilities.
• Our financial position is strong, and we can afford to dip into our savings if we can identify programs that provide good value for our community. It is acceptible to run a deficit in 2026.
• Our highest goods-sold expense is weather data. We should consider finding ways to provide more value to subscribers using these data – for instance, adding APIs so that watchfaces and watchapps can use weather data that subscribers are already paying for, and finding ways to provide weather data on new Core watches.
• At this time, we do not urgently need to seek out other revenue sources, but it may be useful to lay the groundwork for doing so, especially if we can increase our program spending. We should evaluate in the second half of the year if we are on track to meet our spending targets, and if so, we should consider giving our community options to fund our work other than subscriptions.
• Traditionally, Rebble has had difficulty effectively spending on our programming because of our limited administrative bandwidth. We should consider finding a part-time paid executive director to help us achieve our goals in how we want to invest in the community.

On behalf of the Rebble board, we’re looking forward to continuing to serve you in the new year!

Dec 9, 2025 • by Ish Ot Jr.

Happy Rebble Day: the Dev Forum is back!

Today, December 9th, is Rebble Day – the 9th anniversary of the official birth of Rebble – and what better way to celebrate than by sharing the latest evolution of our developer community? I vividly remember the original Pebble forums, where I received help, became inspired, and even began friendships that still endure today. We’ve spent the past decade primarily organizing and socializing on Discord (hey, come join us!), but I have to say, there is something to be said for classic discussion forums. Sure, it was a simpler time back then, but that doesn’t mean that slower, linear, searchable discussions have to be a thing of the past: as the Pebble developer community keeps growing, we’ve been thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to get all of the knowledge that we’ve all assembled into one place that was designed to last? That’s why we’re excited to announce today the launch of the new Rebble dev forum – forum.rebble.io!

The forum is a place to learn from others, get help, discuss hardware old and new, show off your latest watchfaces and apps, collaborate on smartstraps (still my favourite!), and, most importantly, post pics of pets! The forums have only been live (with no promotion until now) for about a week, and already we have dozens of users sharing over a hundred posts across more than fifty topics.

One of the coolest features is our appstore integration – since the forum login is based on your Rebble/Rebble developer account, you can share your detailed appstore listing in the forums and get feedback, encouragement, organize beta testing, and more! In fact, each new or updated app automatically gets its own forum post:

and each appstore listing now contains a link back to its own forum thread so that your users can chat and cheer you on!

We’ve seen some really great interactions happening already, such as in irek’s Naïve watchface thread where they’ve been sharing updates, coordinating betas, receiving encouragement, and making fun connections.

I’ve been constantly impressed with how amazing our community has been on Discord, with some the smartest and kindest people that I’ve seen all in one place, teaching and learning and sharing. It’s been amazing to see dozens of developers already starting to share tips, solve problems, and collaborate on the new Rebble dev forum – why not take a moment to stop in and say hi? And of course, don’t forget to share what’s on your wrist!

Nov 24, 2025 • by the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors

Rebble in your own world

It’s been a bit of a rough ride in the Pebble world lately. Since our blogpost from last week, and Eric’s response to it (read both, if you haven’t yet - there’s a lot of important context in them!), we’ve heard a lot of feedback from the community about the situation we find ourselves in.

When we said we wanted your input in our last post, we meant it - we’ve been closely watching and participating in the conversations since. Thank you to everyone for giving your input, and for being kind to each other in the process! We’re genuinely blown away by how little we’ve had to step in and moderate heated discussions - couldn’t be prouder of this little community we’ve built together. <3

We’ll be honest - our last blogpost was more inflammatory than it needed to be. We’ve been at this for a while, trying to negotiate a deal with Core Devices while also trying to figure out what we want out of that deal at the same time. Clearly, a lot of the tensions we’ve been feeling in that process spilled out there, and it wasn’t as productive as we would have liked as a result.

If anything, it’s made one thing clear to us - we should have gotten the community’s input much earlier! In hindsight, a lot of the division could have been avoided with the level-headed insight you all have given us over the past few days. We’re sorry for letting it get to this point – no one benefits from a fight between Core and Rebble.

We’ve been so appreciative of all of the feedback that we’ve heard. Many of you have given us words of support, and offered your trust and kindness (thank you so much!) – and many of you have also given us hard (and, often, well-deserved!) criticism and suggestions for how we can improve. Today, we want to give you a few concrete steps we’re taking as a result of what you’ve told us, to make sure that we’re worthy of your trust long into the future. Here’s a summary of what we want to talk about:

• We believe that the apps that you made belong to you. We didn’t make that clear enough, and we want to fix that, including by offering for download an archive of the Rebble App Store.
• We have a better understanding of how Eric interacted with the App Store API, and we don’t think that he intended to “steal” from us there.
• We’ve added two more members to the Board of Directors of the Rebble Foundation! And we’re improving the Foundation’s governance to be more transparent.
• We’re ready to figure out what’s next.

Updated November 24th, 8pm Pacific: The app store archives are now available!

On the Rebble App Store

By far, one of the most common criticisms we heard from Core Devices and the community was:

Why does Rebble think they own everything on the Rebble App Store?

It’s a great question! We spent a while scratching our head about this, because, to be clear, we don’t believe this at all.

Of course we don’t own every single app and watchface published to the App Store - those are owned by the people who put in the effort to produce them in the first place! As maintainers of the App Store, our jobs are to get them to users that want them – and to keep them safe, so that effort doesn’t end up lost to time. We don’t want to claim ownership over everyone’s apps - that would be a huge disservice to our amazing community of app developers.

Our last blogpost didn’t do us any favours in this regard, though. The first version contained the following wording:

What you now know as the Pebble App Store from Eric’s new company, Core Devices, is the result of nearly a decade of our work. The data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% Rebble.

A lot of people told us that they interpreted this as “everything in the App Store is 100% owned by Rebble”. Honestly, we can’t really blame them for interpreting it like that (even if we feel it’s a little uncharitable). It was a rough choice of wording on our part, and we should have been a lot clearer from the outset – that shouldn’t have made it to our final copy.

We’ve since edited that section to make our intentions a lot clearer - the part of the App Store that’s 100% Rebble is the maintenance, operation and curation of the App Store itself, not the apps it hosts. We’re sorry we gave the impression that we owned all of your apps and watchfaces - that was never our intention, and we should have been a lot more careful about how we phrased it.

The App Store’s apps and watchfaces belong to the community, not to Rebble. We’ve always believed this, and we don’t intend to change our stance on that anytime soon. In the past, we thought that we could do the best for the community by avoiding fragmentation of the app store. Former Pebble engineer Lance R. Vick had an insightful comment thread on Hacker News that meaningfully changed our opinion: we still think that, as a community, we can build the best app store for the Pebbleverse, but we think he’s right that other people should get to try out their own “alternative visions” for the Pebble ecosystem.

So on that front, we’re publishing a complete archive of all apps and watchfaces on the Rebble App Store for everyone to download and use. You can download it right now on the dev portal (thanks to the modern world of AI scrapers wasting huge amounts of bandwidth, you’ll have to log in, but then click on the gear and click on the download link!). The archive will update each month with the latest export from our database. The archives are free for you to do whatever you want with them - share them around, keep your own backups, anything that you come up with! We only ask that if you do use our archives to make something, please leave a prominent note saying that you got it from us, and provide a link to the archives so people know where you got them from. You don’t have to, but we’d be sad if you didn’t. :(

On Stealing Allegations

One of the main accusations we made in our first post was about Eric scraping the App Store. It was so prominent that it’s even in the title of the post - “Core Devices keeps stealing our work”. At the time, we felt pretty justified in making that claim (we wouldn’t have made it otherwise, obviously). But now that we’ve had some time to cool off, and reflect on things with level heads… yeah, we’ve gotta be totally honest here. This accusation was definitely overheated.

A brief timeline of events from our perspective is in order, so we can explain how we got here. On the 11th of November, there was a very large spike of requests to the App Store for roughly 3,600 watchfaces. On the 14th November, after digging into the logs, we identified that the traffic came from an IP that had made other requests from Eric’s personal Rebble account.

At the time, negotiations around the App Store with Core had already significantly deteriorated, in some of the other ways we discussed in our post. Given that context, we could only assume that this activity was Eric testing a scraper for the App Store.

Snapshot of the App Store logs from November 11th

On the 16th of November, we learnt that Eric had built an application to help him curate a “Top Picks” section for Core Device’s App Store frontend. We had no source code for this yet, but in our concern for how things were going, we assumed that this was part of a larger tool that he had planned to use around these scraped data. After our discussions fell apart on Monday afternoon, our blogpost went out that evening, with the scraping accusations still included.

From the source code that Eric released, we now know that this was not scraping with the intent of supplanting the App Store, but instead with the intent of augmenting its capabilities. We may have been upset with his conduct in other parts of the negotiation process, but Eric’s interactions with our appstore API were surely not meant to be “stealing”, and we no longer consider them that way.

Once we understood this, we should have edited our previous blog post. And we should have done it much sooner, but here we are: we’ve since added some text at the top to reflect this reality, and we can (and wish to) apologize to Eric for taking so long.

[Rebble Foundation intensifies]

One of the common things that we heard – from the community, and from Eric – is that people don’t understand what the Rebble Foundation does, how the Foundation operates, and that we haven’t done a good enough job of being transparent enough to earn your trust. We heard of a few concrete things that would help, and we agree and obviously we should just do them! Here are a handful of things that we’re doing to improve the Foundation’s governance:

• Board elections. Soon, some seats will turn over on the board! Until now, we’ve been co-opting on the Board (i.e., the existing Board agrees to put people on the Board). We’re going to set up a structure so that the community can have a more direct say in how the Foundation is run.
• Meeting notes. We’ve been meeting informally by Discord. This is effective, but we actually need to set more formal plans! The Board is going to meet at least once a quarter in a form that enables us to set goals, and put them on record – and then share them with you all.
• Budget transparency. A handful of folks asked how we were spending our money, and thought it sounded like we were holding our funds as a secret. We don’t intend to be that way, but “just posting on Discord here and there” is not a great way to communicate! The Board will report on our financial situation, and what we’re spending money on, and make that public.

Basically, we should have done all of these things a long time ago – this is how good non-profit governance should work. We got so distracted by all of the noise with setting up the Foundation, and with negotiating about our relationship with Core, that we’ve been making much slower progress on this kind of infrastructure than we would have liked! So watch this space – we anticipate having something to report by the end of January.

And, finally, amidst an otherwise dour blog post, we actually do have some good news to report. We’re excited to add two new members to the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors, bringing our total up to five Directors! We’re happy to welcome:

• Ruby Iris Juric, who you may also know as srxl. She’s been maintaining developer.rebble.io for months now, and has been a real champion of making that experience better for users.
• Stasia Michalska, who you may also know as LCP. They have been recently on an absolute tear of making improvements to the App Store backend, and adding Timeline topics support! Stasia also brings some desperately-needed governance experience from their work on openSUSE.

In addition to their recent contributions, both Ruby and Stasia have been long-time community members and are all-around Good People To Have in the Rebble community. We’re so glad that they’ll be contributing their skills to more directly shape the future of Rebble, and we hope that you will be too!

Settling Disputes

Fighting sucks. We don’t want to keep fighting with Core Devices - no one gets anything out of that. At the end of the day, we want to find a deal with Core that works for Rebble, for Core, and for the broader Pebble community. Concretely, we have no intentions of shutting off access to Rebble Web Services for Core’s watches, nor do we have any desire to. If we must do so at some point in the future, we commit to providing at least a month’s notice before making any changes.

But we do need a usage deal in place, so we can ensure the reliability of our services for Core Devices’ customers. Many people within the community have suggested bringing in a third-party mediator to help us figure out how to work together. We think that’s a great idea, and we’re ready to do that whenever Eric is.

One of the things that we’ve understood from both our blog post and Eric’s is that we have real common ground: what matters to both of us is keeping the Pebble ecosystem alive and kicking. And from the community reaction, what we hear is clear: we can only do that by working together. If you’re reading, Eric - we’re prepared to come back to the table whenever you are. Let’s both do our best to give your users the best possible Pebble experience.

Brighter Days Ahead

Ever since our inception, Rebble’s goal has always been to keep the Pebble community alive. Keeping Pebble alive means more than just Rebble Web Services, a mobile app, and developer tools - it means keeping the space as inclusive, accessible, and welcoming as possible. We have let a lot of anger and division get in the way of a healthy Pebble community. For that, we’re really, truly sorry. We want to get things back on track, and get back to what we all do best - keeping our favourite smartwatches ticking away.

To everyone who has stuck with us up to this point: thank you so, so much. The feedback you’ve given us has been immensely useful for figuring out what our next steps should be. You’ve all been overwhelmingly civil and productive (even when we haven’t!) and we can’t wait to get back to making our Pebbles better than they’ve ever been before with you all. We’ve all got brighter days to look forward to - let’s keep making awesome happen, together.

And as always, we’d love to hear any more feedback that you have. Please feel free to get in touch on Discord, or by e-mailing us, at board@rebble.foundation.

Yours in hope, the new Rebble Board of Directors, David, Joshua, Ruby, Stasia, and Will