How Pebble Users Are Keeping the Smartwatch Alive 3 Years After It Supposedly Died

As retailers started clearing out their inventory of soon-to-be-dead products, Alland, a product manager for a web design agency in New York, picked up a Pebble Time for about $60 A few years later, Alland is more than just a happy Pebble user His RSS feed reader app is the first new release on the Pebble App Store since it officially closed last year, and he's a regular on both the Pebble subreddit and the Discord server for Rebble, a collective of developers that have been keeping the platform alive.

When you ask current Pebble users what they like most about their smartwatches, chances are they'll point to the utilitarian stuff: Instead of a full-color touchscreen like the Apple Watch, Pebble watches have low-power e-paper displays that always stay on and can run for upwards of a week on a single charge A group of Pebble fans had been trying to figure out how to save the smartwatch platform on their own Still, the group hadn't made much progress over the following year, so Berry aligned herself with Rebble and devised another plan: Instead of replacing Pebble's firmware outright, she would build an alternative service layer called Rebble Web Services, allowing users create an account, download apps from the Pebble App Store, and optionally pay for voice dictation and weather app support.

With Rebble Web Services, Pebble users can simply load a web page from Rebble's website on the phone that's connected to their watch, log into a new Rebble account, then press a button to switch over from Pebble's online system Due to a convenient flaw in the way Pebble was set up, Rebble is able to connect to its own boot server when users switch over, in turn connecting to its own set of online services instead of the ones that Pebble was using. . Source