Core Devices keeps stealing our work
56 comments
·November 18, 2025danpalmer
Not cool. I can't help but think this must be pretty self-defeating. The market for the Pebble watches is not general consumers who will never see things like this going on in the background, it's relatively technical people who know a lot about the devices they are using, almost by definition. I can only assume that this will be widely known quickly in the customer base.
There may be another side to this story, but it's so far not a good look for Pebble/Core, and this post is well reasoned and written enough that I doubt there are many places for alternate explanations to hide.
cproctor
I'm new to Pebble and have been excited about joining the community; I have a Pebble Time 2 on preorder. I will certainly cancel the pre-order unless Rebble affirmatively says they are satisfied with the arrangement.
mikepurvis
I'm in the exact same position. It's beyond belief that the new (hardware) company wouldn't see itself in long-term collaboration with the community organization (providing services/platform).
Indeed, it bodes rather poorly for the sustainability of Core if they're already behaving like owning everything is critical to satisfying some hypergrowth checkbox. I kind of thought the whole point of the new organization was not to be another startup and to rather to be more like a scaled cottage industry player, making a niche product for nerds and selling it directly to them for a reasonable upfront profit margin rather than depending on collecting rent from a closed app ecosystem to pay the bills.
abhorrence
I'm torn here. I love that Rebble folks have kept things alive. I also love that Eric underwent the effort to make new hardware.
I'm also a bit sad that this is the first we're hearing of this tension, because it likely would've changed my decision to purchase a new Core 2 Duo watch, and I would've preferred this sort of falling out happen before a lot of devices have been purchased.
cut3
Can you cancel the preorder? Or is the device you mentioned already out and too old to return? Some credit cards will refund you if terms changed after a purchase as well.
synapsomorphy
Assuming Eric / Core doesn't come out with some scathing "real story":
Well, it's better to figure this out today (that Eric / Core are not so great) rather than a year or two down the line when I'd have already bought a new Pebble. Still sucks, I was excited. Never had one but I want something in the same niche.
Does anyone have suggestions for other good low-capability, long battery, hackable eink watches?
shrinks99
What a bummer. It seems like what they're asking for here (a written agreement that users will be able to access 3rd party app stores) would be a win win win for Core Devices, Rebble, and users. Core Devices gets to look like a super good guy (ideally driving interest in the product), Rebble gets to look like a huge winner maintaining something for the community (as they are), and users get an open ecosystem.
There's still a chance for a win here, but looks like the door is closing.
rf15
What a mess. Eric, I think you will have some explaining and negotiating to do. You might feel like you don't have the time, but this could soon turn existential for your project. For now I keep my order up, I'm sure there's a way for both of you to reach an agreement that doesn't devalue one or the other party.
For those immediately jumping ship: have some patience and observe. You heard one side of the story that yes, someone was frustrated enough to drag all of this public, but that cannot possibly tell the whole story. Please stop escalating the problem by throwing it all away and instead seek to reach out and steer this around instead.
mvanveen
Has the Rebble community ever explored their own open source HW for the rebble ecosystem? I know there’s a ton of work involved to get something high quality/consumer grade and there’s obviously cost implications correlated to order volume and we were all hoping Core Devices would offer the goods but maybe we can lean into a community driven model for the hardware as well?
rideontime
Pretty damning. There goes any interest I had in the Pebble revival until this is sorted fairly.
girvo
Oh... oh no :(
I was really looking forward to my pre-ordered Time 2, as a Pebble Steel then Time Round owner.
But you cannot do this to Rebble. You just can't, this is unacceptable. Cancelling my preorder :(
syntaxing
I wonder if there is a third option. Partner with someone like Pine64 and release your own watches. I find it hard to believe that the market is that big to begin with. If you have a small batch that can attract the tinkers and engineers like us, it’ll be a self fulfilling cycle. More users, more contributors, more income.
modeless
I used Rebble for many years and bought the new Core Devices watches. The truth is Rebble will die without new hardware. It was declining in usage and I myself stopped using it when my old Pebble hardware gave out, until the prospect of new hardware came around.
There needs to be a business making money to build the hardware to support this community. I appreciate that Rebble kept the flame alive, but I support Eric and Core Devices in building a business that makes enough money to fund new development of both hardware and software.
girvo
And the hardware is useless without the software... its a smartwatch ecosystem, they need each other, and Core screwing over Rebble is not OK (if it is true)
modeless
Only a small part of the software in use here was written by Rebble. They cloned the Pebble app store originally, but the store has no value by itself. What makes it valuable is the catalog of watchfaces and apps, approximately none of which were built by Rebble. They were originally scraped by Rebble from Pebble, which makes the accusation of scraping here ironic. The software on the watch itself is mostly Pebble software with mostly Core Devices modifications. The phone app was written mostly by Core Devices. By Rebble's own admission using Rebble code only saved Core Devices "a month or two of engineering effort". And the "more restrictive license" they're accused of adding is AGPL, still aggressively open source.
It's also strange to me that the Bluetooth commit they point to before claiming "Rebble paid for the work" was actually written by Liam McLoughlin, a Google and former Fitbit and Pebble engineer. Was Rebble paying a Google engineer?
shkkmo
> By Rebble's own admission using Rebble code only saved Core Devices "a month or two of engineering effort". And the "more restrictive license" they're accused of adding is AGPL, still aggressively open source.
The "a month or two" was specifically about the mobile app, not the firmware, dev portal or store data.
To me it seems pretty obvious that Core Devices has benefited and enourmous amount from Rebble's work. The fact that Core Devices seems uninterested in contributing back tells me all I need to know about their ethics.
shkkmo
> They were originally scraped by Rebble from Pebble, which makes the accusation of scraping here ironic.
Scraping data because the original publisher is going under to prevent the data from being lost is very different from scraping data from someone who you are actively trying negotiate with over use of that data.
> It's also strange to me that the Bluetooth commit they point to before claiming "Rebble paid for the work" was actually written by Liam McLoughlin, a Google and former Fitbit engineer. Was Rebble paying a Google engineer?
The claim was that Rebble paid the developers of NimBLE, Codecoup, to assist with integration of NimBLE into RebbleOS
null
Wow.
> We made it absolutely clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of the Rebble Web Services.
> We’d already agreed to give Core a license to our database to build a recommendation engine on. Then, Eric said that he instead demanded that we give them all of the data that we’ve curated, unrestricted, for him to do whatever he’d like with. We asked to have a conversation last week; he said that was busy and could meet the following week. Instead, the same day, our logs show that he went and scraped our servers.
Seriously uncool. I don't really consider myself a part of the Pebble community anymore (despite having two of the OG Pebble) but I'd def lean towards getting legal input on this...