The mentioned blog post (https://rebble.io/2025/11/17/core-devices-keeps-stealing-our...) is a pretty great example why using Discord as your main communication tool for an open source project is the wrong choice. The only way to read about the decisions ("Shortly after, Core forked PebbleOS1 away from public maintainership. Back in June, they said that they would merge back periodically2;") is to read the manual transcript they added to the blog post.
This is a pretty predictable response. The problem is, this is a classic "he said, she said" situation. So it's pretty tough to tell whom you should believe, unless you are close enough to the situation to see it first-hand. Clearly someone is not playing nice, but it's not clear which party that is. Sucks for the user community though, either way.
Rebble's "one red line" is "there has to be a future for Rebble in there." They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out. There's also emphasis on "our work," "we built this," "we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." They feel Eric isn't acknowledging where his infrastructure came from.
Core Devices' thing is explicitly stating concern about relying on a third party (Rebble) for "critical services" his customers depend on. If "Rebble leadership changes their mind," they can't guarantee customer experience. They wants the app store archive to be "freely available" and "not controlled by one organization." They don't want to need "permission from Rebble" before building features (like free weather, voice-to-text) that might compete with Rebble's paid services. The fundamental fear seems to be business risk: being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Neither side seems to trust the other's long-term intentions, creating an impasse where both feel existentially threatened by the other's preferred arrangement.
My take: I bought a watch in 2014. After the pebble 2 duo black fiasco (they ran out of stock, offered a white instead which I accepted 2 weeks ago, never shipped, and have ghosted my emails asking for shipping timelines.) I had high hopes, but given the messy interaction with the OSS world I'm considering cancelling my order for the duo and time two.
They sent an email a few minutes after I posted, saying that their fulfillment centre dropped the ball and they're escalating internally. I guess complaining on HN worked.
Hope they can figure out the dispute with Rebble. Maybe they end up hosting apps on a package manager and create some binding contract?
> They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out.
It's understandable that Rebble fears someone doing this, since this is what Rebble did.
Rebble took the original open-source Pebble work of thousands of independent developers, scraped it off the original store, and is re-offering it within their own walled garden and calling it "theirs".
It's great Rebble kept things alive but they seem to be fearing a second one of themselves.
> being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Both Rebble and Core Devices are for-profit companies, neither is a non-profit, so I'm not actually sure which you're referring to here.
It is the HashiCorp fiasco all over again. HashiCorp thinks third-party is profiting from Terraform, they relicense, Terraform gets forked into OpenTofu.
Here, Rebble says Core is profiting from their work (hey, look at your licenses). It would be a direct violation of their ToS though, since there is this clause:
> 4. Services Usage Limits
>
> You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, access to the Service, or Content accessed through use of the Service, without Rebble’s express written permission.
So I don't know what to think honestly, I don't see any bad actors here...
I view this entire thing through an extremely simple, reductive lens:
Rebble effectively had free reign on this ecosystem for years, and could have at any time decided to try and capitalize on it further. They still can! But instead they're apparently interested in rent seeking while Core makes real headway.
It's clear that Eric and Core want to make something now. It's not clear what Rebble wants, but it's clear they are feeling left out. That obviously sucks but it's clear from what both sides are saying that Core has been trying to involve Rebble in their efforts. That's certainly noble and I'm not sure others would do the same.
Would Eric be able to do this all without Rebble? Lots of commenters have been saying "no" but I'm skeptic. I was an early Pebble user. I stopped using it before they went bust, and while I was aware of Rebble, there was nothing compelling there for me. It's neat that they have maintained a copy of the original watchfaces but beyond that I don't perceive a ton of value. I don't like the subscription fee. I'm sad they never took a serious crack at making a Rebble watch.
I hope everyone finds a way forward, together, but I'm not optimistic.
Yeah agreed, and I hope the Rebble people read this. They're being very protective and Eric is seemingly trying to include them when he could literally just shut them out.
They did good work in absence of anyone maintaining the product, but they're running software on a product they literally did nothing to build.
Agreed -- While I admire their work in keeping the lights on, Rebble doesn't necessarily make sense in a world where the "real" Pebble company has returned.
Keep in mind that this is their goal statement (straight from their FAQ):
> Our goal is to maintain and advance Pebble functionality, in the absence of Pebble Technology Corp.
Eric's new company, by effectively re-creating Pebble Technology Corp, is an existential threat to that mission: If there is someone else maintaining and advancing Pebble functionality, then what is the purpose of Rebble? It does seem unfortunate though -- I hope they can all work something out.
Why is Rebble so set on protecting this code that would have an incredibly limited shelf life if not for the new Pebble devices? It seems like an incredibly short-sighted fight against someone who (legally) owes them 0 unless they can substantiate the allegation that Pebble stole their code (theirs not being code they themselves scraped after Pebble's initial failure).
This is a bit of a what-if, but I had a Pebble watch back then and was considering trying to make an app for it. The idea that, if I had succeeded and published the app, that Rebble would be claiming ownership over my binary and threatening legal action against the original Pebble creator, to be really quite ridiculous and affronting.
As long as I can get my data from my watch into Home Assistant and maybe Google Health, I'll keep my preorder. Hopefully this drama gets resolved but I never used any of the apps on my soon to be replaced Fitbit.
Almost. The excessive CLA had to go too (or be replaced by a DCO).
CLAs may have a place, but as long as they hadn't planned on a bait and switch all along they wouldn't need a CLA literally copied from Oracle's playbook.
If both sides don't trust each other, no amount license nor contract would suffice.
It would be a headache to prove the other side violate licenses.
In fact, they are already fighting on whether Eric was scraping data illegally or not, and people's opinions are divided. This would be an expensive lawsuit for both sides.
At the current level of trust, it's better not to do any business together at all.
> I disagree. I’m working hard to keep the Pebble ecosystem open source. I believe the contents of the Pebble Appstore should be freely available and not controlled by one organization.
I hate to say this but I have to agree with Eric.
I want to side with Rebble
But they are clearly misguided.
The goal should not be to have an ongoing revenue stream for Rebble.
The goals should be
If and when Eric sells out again, there is a way for
1. all pebble and core devices to continue to get updates somehow (Rebble or otherwise)
2. all apps and metadata will continue to be available somehow (Rebble or otherwise)
The otherwise is key here.
If someone wants to not use Rebble,
they should be able to do that.
Rebble is not the end goal.
Core is not the end goal.
The users are.
> My goal this time round is to make it sustainable.
Was I the only one to get excited when I saw "time round" in a sentence written on Eric's blog? It took a second for me to realize this had nothing to do with the amazing PTR.
You and me both. I have a Pebble Time 2 on order (said I'd buy one if they made it less ugly, and they did!) but what I really want is a Round.
The downside of the old one was the battery life, on the order of 2 days when the battery is new compared to a week with the larger models. But they've been talking about how the new bluetooth hardware is more efficient and should let them get the Pebble Time battery life up to 30 days this time. One imagines that efficiency would get a new PTR up to a week which is plenty. Frankly with monthly charging I'm a little worried I'll lose the charger between uses.
One thing I'm worried about is the thickness of the heart rate sensor, which could be even trickier with how small a Round should be. And that feels like table stakes for a wearable today, I'd buy one without it but I might be in the minority.
The amount of internet drama a smartwatch that stopped being produced ten years ago generates even to this day is truly incredible. Nothing that's happening here is so important as to make enemies, and the fact that Core Devices even wants to use the open source app store and is willing to pay for it should have been an immediate "Yes, that's incredible, lets make it work" from Rebble. So what if they get bought by Fitbit or go closed source? Rebble will just be back to where they were before. That's the beauty of open source; it doesn't need them, it just needs people who are interested in the project.
this part of the response doesn't pass the smell test for me:
> Accusation 4: ‘[Eric] scraped our app store, in violation of the agreement that we reached with him previously’
> Here’s what happened. I wanted to highlight some of my favourite watchfaces on the Pebble Appstore. Last Monday Nov 10, after I put my kids to sleep and between long calls with factories in Asia, I started building a webapp to help me quickly go through Pebble Appstore and decide which were my top picks.
> Let me be crystal clear - my little webapp did not download apps or ‘scrape’ anything from Rebble. The webapp displayed the name of each watchface and screenshots and let me click on my favs. I used it to manually look through 6000 watchfaces with my own eyes. I still have 7,000 to go. Post your server logs, they will match up identically to the app I (well…Claude) wrote (source code here)
so it wasn't "scraping"...it was just a vibe-coded webapp that made at least 6,000 requests to Rebble's servers in a short period of time? possibly more, depending on how many intermediate versions of the app he tested, and possibly many more, if one of those intermediate versions had a vibe-coded "feature" like prefetching a bunch of data for performance reasons?
he agreed not to scrape their services. and then scraped their services. and his excuse seems to boil down to "but I was doing it for a cool reason"
and he tosses in completely unrelated details about putting his kids to bed and having long calls with factories in Asia. those seem calculated to make him sound more relatable - an honest, hardworking, humble family man.
this seems like a relatively minor point in the overall dispute, but if he's unwilling or unable to take any responsibility there, it doesn't boost my confidence that he's being honest about the rest of it.
If you're looking for an alternative to all of this, the BangleJS v2 is both cheaper and more hackable than the Pebble watches. It doesn't tick all of the same boxes, but it's performed well for me over the last 6 months.
Here's what it offers:
* Screen is fully visible under direct sunlight
* With the screen always on the battery lasts me well over a week
* Heart rate monitor
* EXTREMELY hackable, everything can be hacked on with JS, even the
launcher you're using for apps
* 108 Euros shipped to the US
* Fully supported by GadgetBridge (open source mobile app)
Pebble was a smart watch which was not tethered to a phone, talked to the cellular network directly, and had battery life problems, correct? Apple's smart watch was tethered to a phone, so it needed less power.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens when solid state batteries become available and increase how much energy you can store in a watch. They're high cost, but if you're powering a watch, not a car, probably affordable. That could make standalone watches more effective. Maybe eliminate the need to carry a phone all the time.
Hi there, Gerard here. I work for Core as a firmware engineer, happy to answer questions as well.
I personally understand Rebble fears, for example when we forked and kept development under Core Github. However, I think we tried to be as transparent as possible and explained the reasons behind. While Liam (ex-Pebble) did an excellent job integrating NimBLE, it is also true that we also offered to do the work. However he had more availability by then to do so. At the same time, we fixed quite a few bugs after integration, or implemented many missing non-trivial features to make it functional. If you also check Github statistics, you will see that as of today ~93% of commits are from Core employees or paid contractors.
All development is happening in the open, and released under Apache-2.0 license. This is an exception in the industry, specially for core product components. It is also common for companies to fork when developing new products because you need to move fast (check our commit rate!). Think about Linux, can you use upstream Kernel on most new ARM SoCs? No. Core took a risk here because Rebble could have kept adding new features, adding overhead for us with upmerges. Reality is that Rebble repository has been dead since we forked. Nobody except Core, and Liam were contributing by then.
Another fear I've heard is about PebbleOS being sold to another company. Well, the company doing that would be pretty dumb as they could clone it for 0$. And thanks to Apache-2.0, they could even add new proprietary features! Not only that, but if Core winds up, the IP will stay open forever!
I think the best, fair long-term solution is to join a well established OSS organization. Rebble lacks many formalities that are common in many OSS projects: board elections, open and regular meetings, public accounts, voting rules, etc. This makes it a dysfunctional community to me. It is up to Rebble to fix these problems or join forces in a new OSS org. Core can't do much more than that. It is also not bad that the two parts have different views, e.g. Core may think a local voice-to-text model is better but Rebble may disagree because that could imply a revenue loss. That's unavoidable, in the end, people could choose at that point.
Seems like there is a commercial agreement between the two parties, but it somehow doesn't capture everything they need. They're relying on some kind of unspoken agreement but now they don't trust each other. they should make a new agreement.
The scraping part seems very weak. You can't sign an agreement that says no scraping and then proceed to build a scraping bot and think it's ok because you only wanted to "look" at the data.
I'd definitely have doubts about the partnership too
58 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 73.7 ms ] threadCore Devices keeps stealing our work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960893 - Nov 2025 (110 comments)
Rebble's "one red line" is "there has to be a future for Rebble in there." They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out. There's also emphasis on "our work," "we built this," "we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." They feel Eric isn't acknowledging where his infrastructure came from.
Core Devices' thing is explicitly stating concern about relying on a third party (Rebble) for "critical services" his customers depend on. If "Rebble leadership changes their mind," they can't guarantee customer experience. They wants the app store archive to be "freely available" and "not controlled by one organization." They don't want to need "permission from Rebble" before building features (like free weather, voice-to-text) that might compete with Rebble's paid services. The fundamental fear seems to be business risk: being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Neither side seems to trust the other's long-term intentions, creating an impasse where both feel existentially threatened by the other's preferred arrangement.
My take: I bought a watch in 2014. After the pebble 2 duo black fiasco (they ran out of stock, offered a white instead which I accepted 2 weeks ago, never shipped, and have ghosted my emails asking for shipping timelines.) I had high hopes, but given the messy interaction with the OSS world I'm considering cancelling my order for the duo and time two.
Hope they can figure out the dispute with Rebble. Maybe they end up hosting apps on a package manager and create some binding contract?
It's understandable that Rebble fears someone doing this, since this is what Rebble did.
Rebble took the original open-source Pebble work of thousands of independent developers, scraped it off the original store, and is re-offering it within their own walled garden and calling it "theirs".
It's great Rebble kept things alive but they seem to be fearing a second one of themselves.
> being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Both Rebble and Core Devices are for-profit companies, neither is a non-profit, so I'm not actually sure which you're referring to here.
Here, Rebble says Core is profiting from their work (hey, look at your licenses). It would be a direct violation of their ToS though, since there is this clause:
> 4. Services Usage Limits > > You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, access to the Service, or Content accessed through use of the Service, without Rebble’s express written permission.
So I don't know what to think honestly, I don't see any bad actors here...
Rebble effectively had free reign on this ecosystem for years, and could have at any time decided to try and capitalize on it further. They still can! But instead they're apparently interested in rent seeking while Core makes real headway.
It's clear that Eric and Core want to make something now. It's not clear what Rebble wants, but it's clear they are feeling left out. That obviously sucks but it's clear from what both sides are saying that Core has been trying to involve Rebble in their efforts. That's certainly noble and I'm not sure others would do the same.
Would Eric be able to do this all without Rebble? Lots of commenters have been saying "no" but I'm skeptic. I was an early Pebble user. I stopped using it before they went bust, and while I was aware of Rebble, there was nothing compelling there for me. It's neat that they have maintained a copy of the original watchfaces but beyond that I don't perceive a ton of value. I don't like the subscription fee. I'm sad they never took a serious crack at making a Rebble watch.
I hope everyone finds a way forward, together, but I'm not optimistic.
They did good work in absence of anyone maintaining the product, but they're running software on a product they literally did nothing to build.
Keep in mind that this is their goal statement (straight from their FAQ):
> Our goal is to maintain and advance Pebble functionality, in the absence of Pebble Technology Corp.
Eric's new company, by effectively re-creating Pebble Technology Corp, is an existential threat to that mission: If there is someone else maintaining and advancing Pebble functionality, then what is the purpose of Rebble? It does seem unfortunate though -- I hope they can all work something out.
Today is the day I found out Rebble is claiming the ownership of my app's binaries. All I can say is that they don't have it.
Isn't this the exact point of copyleft licenses?
Relicense PebbleOS as GPL, relicense Rebble as AGPL.
Problem is then solved, no?
CLAs may have a place, but as long as they hadn't planned on a bait and switch all along they wouldn't need a CLA literally copied from Oracle's playbook.
If both sides don't trust each other, no amount license nor contract would suffice.
It would be a headache to prove the other side violate licenses.
In fact, they are already fighting on whether Eric was scraping data illegally or not, and people's opinions are divided. This would be an expensive lawsuit for both sides.
At the current level of trust, it's better not to do any business together at all.
I hate to say this but I have to agree with Eric. I want to side with Rebble But they are clearly misguided. The goal should not be to have an ongoing revenue stream for Rebble.
The goals should be
If and when Eric sells out again, there is a way for
1. all pebble and core devices to continue to get updates somehow (Rebble or otherwise)
2. all apps and metadata will continue to be available somehow (Rebble or otherwise)
The otherwise is key here. If someone wants to not use Rebble, they should be able to do that.
Rebble is not the end goal. Core is not the end goal. The users are.
Was I the only one to get excited when I saw "time round" in a sentence written on Eric's blog? It took a second for me to realize this had nothing to do with the amazing PTR.
The downside of the old one was the battery life, on the order of 2 days when the battery is new compared to a week with the larger models. But they've been talking about how the new bluetooth hardware is more efficient and should let them get the Pebble Time battery life up to 30 days this time. One imagines that efficiency would get a new PTR up to a week which is plenty. Frankly with monthly charging I'm a little worried I'll lose the charger between uses.
One thing I'm worried about is the thickness of the heart rate sensor, which could be even trickier with how small a Round should be. And that feels like table stakes for a wearable today, I'd buy one without it but I might be in the minority.
Looks like they were not consulted by Eric before this post.
> Accusation 4: ‘[Eric] scraped our app store, in violation of the agreement that we reached with him previously’
> Here’s what happened. I wanted to highlight some of my favourite watchfaces on the Pebble Appstore. Last Monday Nov 10, after I put my kids to sleep and between long calls with factories in Asia, I started building a webapp to help me quickly go through Pebble Appstore and decide which were my top picks.
> Let me be crystal clear - my little webapp did not download apps or ‘scrape’ anything from Rebble. The webapp displayed the name of each watchface and screenshots and let me click on my favs. I used it to manually look through 6000 watchfaces with my own eyes. I still have 7,000 to go. Post your server logs, they will match up identically to the app I (well…Claude) wrote (source code here)
so it wasn't "scraping"...it was just a vibe-coded webapp that made at least 6,000 requests to Rebble's servers in a short period of time? possibly more, depending on how many intermediate versions of the app he tested, and possibly many more, if one of those intermediate versions had a vibe-coded "feature" like prefetching a bunch of data for performance reasons?
he agreed not to scrape their services. and then scraped their services. and his excuse seems to boil down to "but I was doing it for a cool reason"
and he tosses in completely unrelated details about putting his kids to bed and having long calls with factories in Asia. those seem calculated to make him sound more relatable - an honest, hardworking, humble family man.
this seems like a relatively minor point in the overall dispute, but if he's unwilling or unable to take any responsibility there, it doesn't boost my confidence that he's being honest about the rest of it.
Here's what it offers:
* Screen is fully visible under direct sunlight
* With the screen always on the battery lasts me well over a week
* Heart rate monitor
* EXTREMELY hackable, everything can be hacked on with JS, even the launcher you're using for apps
* 108 Euros shipped to the US
* Fully supported by GadgetBridge (open source mobile app)
https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2
* Hackable - Only using Chrome. I haven't discovered any other method but I'd love to be corrected on this.
* Totally touchscreen based and the touchscreen ain't that good.
* Screen might be visible but any Pebble, past or present, is way better
But it's still super fun.
You need to use the forked custom Gadgetbridge to make the most of it too.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens when solid state batteries become available and increase how much energy you can store in a watch. They're high cost, but if you're powering a watch, not a car, probably affordable. That could make standalone watches more effective. Maybe eliminate the need to carry a phone all the time.
I personally understand Rebble fears, for example when we forked and kept development under Core Github. However, I think we tried to be as transparent as possible and explained the reasons behind. While Liam (ex-Pebble) did an excellent job integrating NimBLE, it is also true that we also offered to do the work. However he had more availability by then to do so. At the same time, we fixed quite a few bugs after integration, or implemented many missing non-trivial features to make it functional. If you also check Github statistics, you will see that as of today ~93% of commits are from Core employees or paid contractors.
All development is happening in the open, and released under Apache-2.0 license. This is an exception in the industry, specially for core product components. It is also common for companies to fork when developing new products because you need to move fast (check our commit rate!). Think about Linux, can you use upstream Kernel on most new ARM SoCs? No. Core took a risk here because Rebble could have kept adding new features, adding overhead for us with upmerges. Reality is that Rebble repository has been dead since we forked. Nobody except Core, and Liam were contributing by then.
Another fear I've heard is about PebbleOS being sold to another company. Well, the company doing that would be pretty dumb as they could clone it for 0$. And thanks to Apache-2.0, they could even add new proprietary features! Not only that, but if Core winds up, the IP will stay open forever!
I think the best, fair long-term solution is to join a well established OSS organization. Rebble lacks many formalities that are common in many OSS projects: board elections, open and regular meetings, public accounts, voting rules, etc. This makes it a dysfunctional community to me. It is up to Rebble to fix these problems or join forces in a new OSS org. Core can't do much more than that. It is also not bad that the two parts have different views, e.g. Core may think a local voice-to-text model is better but Rebble may disagree because that could imply a revenue loss. That's unavoidable, in the end, people could choose at that point.
I'd definitely have doubts about the partnership too
That must be making Rebble upset?