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Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

ericmigi.com

41–50 of 258 posts

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#41
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between this product (and other open source-style projects) and every other product you purchase is all the drama’s happening out in the open. Google, Apple, and Amazon all have the kind of infighting that would embarrass the Sun King’s court, it’s just all kept inside the palace walls.

There is drama for Watchy, but I don't think there is any for BangleJS (other than being a bit iffy on iphones)

[deleted]

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#42

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.

I am one of the developers who did make Pebble apps - here's a screenshot with the Pebble version of Weathergraph on Eric's watch: https://x.com/weathergraph/status/1959253197664469246

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.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#43
post #9

Summarizing the dispute, for anyone interested: 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…

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?

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#44
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.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#45
post #9

Summarizing the dispute, for anyone interested: 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…

> 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.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#47
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.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also weather and voice recognition services. If implemented with third party APIs those costs can add up.

They charged a subscription for those. If they lost money on that they have nobody to blame but themselves.

This thread is very confusing to me - they charged a subscription for these features. They weren't losing money - they were spending it. Money in, money out.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#50
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)

https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2

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