Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky Is Bringing It Back

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

David Pierce, writing at The Verge, “The Pebble Smartwatch Is Making a Comeback”:

Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.

To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.

The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still owns that — doesn’t have a name yet.

My first idea for a new name: Rebble — a rebellious return of Pebble. My second idea: Quixote — because this isn’t going to be a hit this time either. (Quixote also would have been a good name for Beeper Mini’s attempt to backwards engineer access as an unsanctioned iMessage client for Android.) But, thankfully, it doesn’t sound to me like Migicovsky’s goal is to boil the ocean. (Update: Turns out, Rebble is the name of a community project to write new firmware to keep old Pebble watches running.)

Migicovsky, on his blog:

You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since 2012. I’ve tried every single smart watch out there, but none do it for me. No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want:

  • Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)
  • Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)
  • Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)
  • Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)
  • Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watchfaces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watchfaces on the Pebble appstore!)

If their goal is to be to smartwatches what Playdate is to handheld gaming, that’s definitely achievable, and if they succeed, will by definition be a lot of fun.

The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion-) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!). Many of the best and most beloved movies ever made weren’t big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. If your list of all-time favorite movies doesn’t include a bunch that were made on shoestring budgets, your whole list probably sucks, because you have no taste. The same is of course true for music, games, and everything else. Indie art is often great art, imbued by the souls and obsessions of its creators, and blockbuster art is often garbage art, imbued only by soulless corporate bureaucracies.

Computer hardware and software can be — ought to be — attempts at creating art.