I backed the original pebble on kickstarter and it’s what got me into smart watches. Happy they’re coming back and that they’re open source.
Edit: if I’m remembering correctly wasn’t there some server that the original pebble used that shut done that ended up knee-capping it? Wonder if there’s anything server-side being used here that could do the same.
Pebble still works thanks to the Rebble project. Everything else is free, but the dictation and weather services require a monthly $3 subscription to use as those are the parts that have rather hefty API call costs.
Though the experience is miserable on iOS. That’s entirely all thanks to Apple.
Here are the things that are harder or impossible for 3rd party smartwatches (ie non Apple Watches) to do on iPhone:
There’s no way for a smartwatch to send text messages or iMessages.
You can’t reply to notifications or take ‘actions’ like marking something as done.
It’s very difficult to enable other iOS apps to work with Pebble. Basically iOS does not have the concept of ‘interprocess communication’(IPC) like on Android. What we did before was publish an SDK that other apps (like Strava) could integrate to make their own BLE connection to Pebble. It was a clunky quasi-solution that other apps didn’t like, because it was hard to test (among other things)
If you (accidentally) close our iOS app, then your watch can’t talk to app or internet
Impossible for watch to detect if you are using your phone, so your watch will buzz and display a notification even if you are staring at your iPhone
You can’t easily side load apps onto an iPhone. That means we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore. This is a gigantic pain because Apple. Every update comes with the risk that a random app reviewer could make up some BS excuse and block the update.
Because of iOS Appstore rules, it would be hard for us to enable 3rd party watchface/app developers to charge for their work (ie we can’t easily make an appstore within our app)
Getting a Javascript engine to run in PebbleOS forced us to go through many hoops due to iOS — creating a compiler inside the Pebble iPhone app that in itself needed to be written in (cross-compiled to) JS to work with Apple’s restriction on downloadable code can only be JS
Oh yeah that is wack. When I used my old pebble I was on android but now I use both with iOS being more for communication. I think it’s easier to get apps into TestFlight. I wonder why they don’t do that.
I recently did out my old 401B after the screen fell off my Galaxy Active2. It charged right up and still lasts about a week.
Finding a new band was a PITA because of the weird segmented hinge bit but one person was selling diver bands for it on Amazon (I think it was Amazon)… Really not bad for a watch from a decade ago.
Edit: Yes, you can still use them without the OG servers being up, look up ‘Rebble’ (rebble.io)
I backed the original pebble on kickstarter and it’s what got me into smart watches. Happy they’re coming back and that they’re open source.
Edit: if I’m remembering correctly wasn’t there some server that the original pebble used that shut done that ended up knee-capping it? Wonder if there’s anything server-side being used here that could do the same.
Pebble still works thanks to the Rebble project. Everything else is free, but the dictation and weather services require a monthly $3 subscription to use as those are the parts that have rather hefty API call costs.
Though the experience is miserable on iOS. That’s entirely all thanks to Apple.
What makes it miserable on iOS?
The Pebble app was removed from the App store, so you have to manually sideload it every 7 days.
And:
Oh yeah that is wack. When I used my old pebble I was on android but now I use both with iOS being more for communication. I think it’s easier to get apps into TestFlight. I wonder why they don’t do that.
I recently did out my old 401B after the screen fell off my Galaxy Active2. It charged right up and still lasts about a week.
Finding a new band was a PITA because of the weird segmented hinge bit but one person was selling diver bands for it on Amazon (I think it was Amazon)… Really not bad for a watch from a decade ago.
Edit: Yes, you can still use them without the OG servers being up, look up ‘Rebble’ (rebble.io)