Free the Pebbles!

As the old saying goes: you never forget your first. For many people, the Pebble watch released in the early 2010s was their first smartwatch, and they have definitely not forgotten it. The simple, stylish design, highly usable interface, and long battery life made Pebble watches a massive crowd funding success story and secured a fiercely loyal user base to this day.

Even still, Pebble was not a big commercial success. Things were looking up when Fitbit purchased the brand — until they decided to discontinue it. Then a few years later, with Google’s acquisition of Fitbit, new life was once again breathed into Pebble. By mostly open sourcing Pebble hardware and software, Google made it possible for them to be produced once again. Eric Migicovsky, the original creator of Pebble, wasted no time and started directing the design of a new batch of watches.

But the asterisk next to “open source” bothered a lot of people. With the rollercoaster Pebble has been on over its short lifespan, who knows what could happen next? Are they just destined to disappear? Fortunately, that does not seem to be the case. Migicovsky has just announced that Pebble watches are finally 100% open source. As such, no critical secrets will ever stand in the way of a new watch being developed.

Until now, Pebble software sat at roughly 95% open source — enough for enthusiasts to tinker with, but not enough to guarantee survival if development ceased. The final missing component has now been released: the new Pebble mobile companion app. With its source code fully available, users can build, modify, and maintain the watch ecosystem indefinitely.

PebbleOS, the mobile companion app, and the developer tools are all now fully open for community participation. The Pebble Appstore is also getting an upgrade, now capable of supporting multiple distributed feeds similar to Linux package repositories. Migicovsky’s company has launched its own feed and developer dashboard, with automatic archival backups to ensure watchfaces and apps aren’t lost to time — a fate that once seemed very possible after Fitbit shut down the original ecosystem.

Hardware longevity is also a priority. The upcoming Pebble Time 2, which is currently moving through design verification testing, is being built with repairability in mind, featuring a removable backplate and replaceable battery. Updated schematics and design files for the Pebble 2 Duo are already available on GitHub, giving hardware hackers the tools to create Pebble-compatible devices of their own.

Migicovsky cautions that manufacturing timelines may shift, especially with Chinese New Year disruptions on the horizon, but early units could ship as soon as January, with most Pebble Time 2 owners receiving their watches in March or April. For a community that has waited years for a revival, a few more months seems a small price to pay, particularly now that Pebble’s future finally lies in the hands of its community, and not behind a lock and key.