Nov 17, 2025 • by Team Rebble
Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our Work
This is a post that we don’t take any joy in writing. When we wrote last month about our agreement with Core Devices, we went into it believing that cooperation between Core and Rebble would be the best decision for the Pebble community. Core would spearhead the development of brand new watches, and we’d be there to provide our Rebble Web Services to go with them.
Unfortunately, our agreement is already breaking down. We hoped that by putting on a kind face, and publishing an optimistic-sounding blog post along with Eric, that we’d be able to collaborate in a way that met our responsibilities to you, our users. We knew that neither of us would be able to get all we wanted, but we thought we had enough common ground that we could serve Pebble users together.
Rebble has been working since the beginning to keep the Pebble experience alive – maintaining the App Store, building new services like Bobby, and running frontline support for people keeping their Pebbles ticking the whole time. (The Pebble App Store that Core offers right now is backed by Rebble!) But Eric and Core recently demanded that, instead of working together, we need to just give them all of our work from the last decade so that they could do whatever they want with it. And in Eric’s latest newsletter, he hasn’t told you the truth about where the work that makes his business run came from. We’d rather have cooperated with them to build something great together, but we’ve reached an impasse. So now, we’re asking you – our community – what to do with Core.
How we got here
Nine years ago, Eric Migicovsky’s company, Pebble Technology Corporation, went out of business and dropped support for the hundreds of thousands of Pebble smartwatches out there. Rebble – and our community! – put together a Herculean effort to salvage the data that was left on the Pebble app store.
Since then, we built a replacement app store API that was compatible with the old app store front end. We built a storage backend for it, and then we spent enormous effort to import the data that we salvaged. We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around. So far, we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data. And the humans who run the Rebble servers have also spent incredibly late nights upgrading Kubernetes clusters, responding to outages, and generally keeping things ticking.
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. And the App Store that we’ve built together is much more than it was when Pebble stopped existing. We’ve patched hundreds of apps with Timeline and weather endpoint updates. We’ve curated removal requests from people who wanted to unpublish their apps. And it has new versions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we’ve run!
We’ve been negotiating with Eric for months now. We’ll compromise on almost everything else, but our one red line is this:
... continue reading