All thanks to the Rebble Alliance
The crowdfunded Pebble smartwatch officially died last June, but a group of dedicated Pebble fans are giving Pebbles second lives, as detailed in this great article on iFixit that you should go read.
The Pebble launched to a record-breaking Kickstarter
in 2012 because it looked like it had the potential to be the first
good smartwatch. Part of the appeal was that it seemed ahead of its time
— it could do things like show you notifications and help you control
your phone’s music, which would become table stakes for smartwatches
made by other companies in the years to come.
The first Pebble seemed ahead of its time
But
once the Apple Watch entered the market in 2015, it was game over for
Pebble. The company was acquired by Fitbit in late 2016, and Fitbit
eventually announced it would shut down Pebble’s web services, which
included an app store, voice dictation, weather, and more.
iFixit’s story chronicles how the “Rebble Alliance,” a group of
dedicated Pebble fans, developers, and ex-employees, banded together to
document and save as much about Pebble as they could so that they could
rebuild what would otherwise be lost.
As the story explains, the
Rebble Alliance has been incredibly successful. Among other things
highlighted in the story, there’s now a GitHub that preserves an incredible amount of technical information about the Pebble, web services
(some with paid subscribers!) that replace much of what was shut down
by Fitbit, and even aspirations of reverse-engineering Pebble’s firmware
to someday be able to build custom, Pebble-like smartwatches.
It’s an great story — and you should go read it on iFixit.
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