The rebirth of Pebble is radically unambitious

Eric Migicovsky has barely started working on a successor to the Pebble smartwatch, and he’s already talking about being finished with it.

Eight years ago, Migicovsky shut down the smartwatch startup he founded, having sold its software assets to Fitbit, which later became part of Google. But all this time, he and thousands of Pebble die-hards have continued to wear their watches, aided in part by a community that’s kept Pebble’s app store and core services alive. Last month, Migicovsky persuaded Google to make Pebble’s software open source, and now he’s started a company to build new watches. (They won’t be called Pebbles, though, since Google still owns the name.)

While there’s plenty to do before new watches can ship, the longevity of current Pebbles taught Migicovsky a lesson: Not every gadget needs an annual release cycle, a steady cadence of software launches, and a change-the-world mindset. Instead, it’s possible to release a finished product that stays in its lane. This is an atypical approach to consumer tech, but it will be a defining trait for Pebble’s successor.

“Pebble has not had a firmware update in eight years, and it still is—for me, at least, for the features I want—the best option on the market, which is crazy,” Migicovsky says. “Before that, we were updating every month . . . and I never once realized, or thought, or even considered: What if we were done?”

Why Pebble is special

As one of those last remaining active Pebble users, I understand where Migicovsky is coming from. I’ve worn a Pebble Time Steel on and off ever since it launched in 2015, and I even bought a couple more as backups in case of hardware failure (both of which I eventually had to start using).

While I’ve dabbled in Apple Watches and Android’s WearOS models, I always drift back to Pebble. I’m not big into quantified health, so the increasing fitness focus of other watches doesn’t resonate with me. A watch that delivers notifications, music controls, and timers is good enough, and Pebble arguably does those things better than any modern smartwatch. The battery lasts for a week, so I can leave the charger at home on weekend outings, and side buttons let me control music or dismiss notifications without even looking at the screen.

Meanwhile, Pebble’s lo-fi design has become part of its allure. The Game Boy aesthetic, fun animations, and thousands of installable watch faces give Pebble a geeky charm, made all the more novel by how many people wear identical Apple Watches on their wrists. Migicovsky says the aesthetics help explain why Pebble has maintained its enthusiastic community of users.

“It was retro when it started, because of the black-and-white feel, and so I think it didn’t become dated because it was already dated,” Migicovsky says. “That stuck around in people’s memories, and on a lot of people’s wrists.”

Bringing Pebble back

You can still find Pebble watches on sites like eBay, but getting them to work is a challenge. Pebble’s iPhone app departed the App Store in 2021 because no one kept up its Apple Developer account, so you have to sideload it using work-arounds like AltStore. On Android 15 and above, new security requirements make direct sideloading impossible, so you have to push the app to your phone from a computer.

Even if you get the app installed, it won’t do much on its own because Pebble’s servers shut down in 2018. Fully reviving the watch requires a tool called Rebble Web Services, which hijacks the setup process to provide its own version of Pebble’s app store and online features, such as weather and voice dictation. It’s a miracle that any of this works, but the end result is a product that still fulfills its original purpose.

All of which means that Migicovsky’s work is largely about delivering a functional product rather than a reimagined one. Existing Pebble owners will get a new app that works without any rigmarole, and newcomers will get modern hardware that preserves Pebble’s apps, watch faces, and core features, including an always-on e-paper screen and physical buttons.

As for new functions, Migicovsky’s plans are surprisingly low-key. His to-do list includes things like adding more notification icons for apps that didn’t exist a decade ago and providing a standard weather API for watch face makers. He expresses some admiration for the “complications” features of Apple Watches but is noncommittal about bringing the idea to a Pebble successor.

Meanwhile, Migicovsky flatly rejects some more ambitious concepts for Pebble that never came to fruition, like wristbands with extra features built in. (Pebble’s original attempt at that idea, called SmartStraps, went nowhere.) In a blog post following up on the original announcement, he warned people to temper their expectations.

“Please don’t get your hopes up that the new watch will have X/Y/Z new feature,” he wrote, noting that Pebble will be “almost exactly” as users remember it, except now with open-source software that can be modified and improved.

The open-source door

Pebble was always amenable to tinkering by outside developers. Even before adding its own health features, Pebble allowed apps like Misfit to track steps and sleep in the background. And when Katharine Berry, a third-party developer, built a web-based tool for making watch apps, Pebble hired her and started recommending the tool itself. (Berry, who now works at Google, later became instrumental in developing Rebble Web Services and getting Google to open-source the Pebble operating system.)

Now that anyone can use and modify Pebble’s source code, the door is open to even wilder modifications. While Migicovsky will stick to what sounds mostly like a Pebble rerelease, he’s content to let outside developers experiment.

“We were an amazingly hackable smartwatch then. Now that the OS is open source, there’s nothing you can’t hack on it,” he says. “You can build new hardware. You can add new features. You can write a new mobile app.”

Regardless of how much hacking actually happens, the approach at least gives Pebble’s successor a clearer identity. By Migicovsky’s admission, one reason Pebble failed is that it never settled on who it was for. The watch began as a geeky gadget, but later pitched itself as a productivity tool, then pivoted toward fitness features in a last-ditch attempt to compete with Fitbit and the Apple Watch.

This time, Migicovsky won’t make that mistake. “If you had to take one of those three,” he says, “I’ll take geek every day.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91277089/the-rebirth-of-pebble-is-radically-unambitious?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss