It's great to see the app open-sourced! Hopefully this can be distributed on F-Droid one day soon!
And the ability to choose app repos is also a wonderful development. Nothing against Rebble at all, but more choices and more openness is always better!
I know it's not your focus, but what's your take on the Core app frontend being closed source? I know libpebble3 is open and has the important bits, but it still feels bad to be unable to build an APK or grab that from F-Droid.
I had initially assumed it was because of some kind of dependency redistribution issue, but I think I read somewhere it was to stymie clones being developed and using the app. But that's part of an open ecosystem, no? That anyone can integrate into it?
This whole thing is presented a bit hyberbolically on both ends.
Rebble has valid concerns about the ecosystem surviving beyond Core. Their concerns about the closed-source parts of what Core has developed is valid (WRT the Core app frontend) and Eric positioning himself as a "benevolent dictator" is a reasonable red flag to raise. The next dictator (in case of acquisition) may not be so benevolent.
But while their stewardship of the app store and continuance of services is laudable, they can't really justifiably cry foul when someone "scrapes" their archive of mostly-scraped (from the original store) content.
Hopefully this teaches both sides that an open ecosystem means operating in the open. Which means making all source available not hiding vital components, and also not squawking about someone scraping the store.
Amazfit is closed, Pebble is open. That's reason enough for me to avoid the former.
As enshittification encroaches on every corner of the technology ecosystem, a company putting out products in 2025 in a way that embraces its community and works in the open is laudable.
Maybe Pebble will turn evil one day, but at least the watches we have today will still work until they physically wear out, not when the company decides they should die.
> "They sold cheap" as soon as they encountered some hardship
Nobody is perfect, and running a small hardware startup is difficult. I'm not saying Eric and co are perfect, but it seems like he's been fairly forthright about the mistakes made at Pebble[1] and what Core aims to do better.
Shit happens, people make mistakes, Apple/Google decide to compete with you and/or lock you out of parts of their garden.
They shipped hardware! They successfully open sourced a beloved platform and embraced the community ecosystem that sprung up around it. What more do you want?
At last! I really enjoyed my time with the Oculus Quest 2, but could not stomach having Meta in my house/on my network. I sold it and resolved to either wait until I could get a good deal on an Index or Valve came around with something new, and now I can look forward to VR again!
Attention to detail is at odds with the pursuit of infinite, quarterly growth. Why take time to get it right when you can get something out the door for your next review? The quality of which doesn't matter because it's in the past, a quarter that's already closed.
> but eventually there's always a tipping point where things go upside down chaotic and I don't feel like we are that far away from it now.
The members of the billionaire class with any foresight are making a calculated bet that they will be in control of sufficient technological measures to suppress any kind of mass uprising by the populace. Look at all the resources going to Anduril and Palantir. Foucault's boomerang is on its way back towards the US populace right now.
That said, even that cadre far overestimates what technology can do. Adaptation is a fundamental pillar of the human condition.
And the ability to choose app repos is also a wonderful development. Nothing against Rebble at all, but more choices and more openness is always better!
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