The W

When Fitbit acquired smartwatch maker Pebble in 2016 the company stopped making new Pebble hardware and eventually shut down the app store and other cloud services used by Pebble watches. But a group of independent developers stepped in and created the Rebble Alliance, which maintains a set of third-party services that basically let you continue using a Pebble smartwatch after the official servers were shut down.

Over the past nine years, not only has Rebble continued to make thousands of Pebble apps and watch faces available for users to download and install, but it's also been a platform for developers who want to create new apps for old watches. Now that new Pebble hardware is a thing again though, Rebble is going mainstream. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky has announced that the official Pebble Appstore for new Pebble watches is powered by Rebble.

Weather Land in the Pebble/Rebble app store

Earlier this year Migicovsky introduced a new company called Core Devices that's making new Pebble devices including the Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2.

While these are new watches with new hardware, they're still designed to be simple devices that are mostly compatible with apps and watch faces designed for hardware that's more than a decade ago. So it's likely that most apps in the Rebble store will run on the new watches.

The new app store looks a lot like Pebble's old one, with a few smal l changes including social link previews for sharing apps on social media and a "you might also like" recommendation section at the bottom of each app listing that shows similar apps or watch faces that you might want to consider.

It's possible that more new features could be on the way. Some that are under consideration include an option to try an app in an emulator before installing it on your watch and another that would provide a warning about broken APIs or settings pages to let you know if an older app might run poorly on your new device.

Rebble remains a non-profit and the developers working on it aren't becoming Core Devices employees. But Migicovsky says Core Devices "is funding" the non-profit so that customers who buy a new Pebble watch won't need to pay a subscription to access the app store on their devices. Folks who want to continue supporting Rebble can make donations and/or pay for subscriptions for access to other features though.

I n other Pebble news, there's an updated SDK and Cloud IDE for developing apps, tools for upscaling watch faces and apps to the larger, higher-res screen on the Pebble Time 2, and a pre-release version of the Pebble mobile app available for testing on Android and iOS.

via Eric Migicovsky and Rebble

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