The Pebble line of smartwatches is back. But in some ways it never really went away… because after Fitbit acquired Pebble in 2016 and stopped making Pebble-branded hardware, an independent team of developers got to work creating an open source software ecosystem that allowed existing watches to continue functioning.
For the past decade, the Rebble project has maintained an app store and other web services. And when Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky regained the rights to make new Pebble-branded devices running a new version of PebbleOS, he relied heavily on the work done by the Rebble team. For example, the new official Pebble app store is powered by Rebble. But now the Rebble team says its agreement with that Migicovsky’s new company, Core Devices, is “already breaking down.” Migicovsky agrees – but he paints a very different picture of the reasons for the dispute.
Pebble Time 2
In a nutshell, Rebble and Migicovsky are both accusing each other of trying to create a “walled garden” that would give one team or the other total control over the Pebble App Store and ecosystem.
For Rebble’s part, the non-profit says it’s happy to let Core Devices build an ecosystem that’s based on top of Rebble’s services… as long as Core Devices agrees not to just take Rebble’s data and use it to create its own store and services without contributing anything back to Rebble.
This, according to Rebble would fly in the face of everything the team has done over the past 9 years to ensure that people can continue using Pebble devices by ensuring they can connect to a third-party set of web services that are not controlled by the company that makes the hardware.
Migicovsky, meanwhile claims that it’s Rebble who is trying to create a walled garden. He notes that much of the data Rebble wants to prevent Core Devices from scraping from its servers consists of the apps and watch faces that Rebble scraped from the original Pebble App Store before it was discontinued.
Pebble App Store (based on Rebble)
He says Rebble is trying to maintain sole control over that data, which includes 13,000 apps and watch faces, some of which were uploaded after Pebble went out of business, but many of which predate Rebble’s existence. Migicovsky says he is the the one “working hard to keep the Pebble ecosystem open source” and that “the contents of the Pebble Appstore should be freely available and not controlled by one organization.”
In other words, the dispute boils down to this:
Rebble doesn’t want a single for-profit company to control the future of the Pebble app store and ecosystem, and worries that’s what Core Devices is trying to do.Migicovsky (and by extension, Core Devices) worries that by building a product that relies heavily on an app store and web services controlled by a third party, there’s no guarantee that features that work today will continue to work in the future.
Those… both seem like pretty good points, honestly.
Rebble outlines several specific complaints in its blog post, and Migicovsky refutes them in his… while also sharing a copy of the specific agreement between Rebble and Core Devices. He also implies that the Rebble blog post may not reflect the views of everyone associated with Rebble.
It’s unclear what will happen next in this dispute, but the long-term viability of any new Pebble-branded devices could depend on the outcome of talks between the two groups.
This article was first published at 11:52 AM on Nov 18, 2025 and most recently updated at 1:20 PM, Nov 18, 2025 with Migicovsky’s response.
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