Free Pebble Watch Software Is Now Open Source 2025

Pre-production Pebble Time 2 (Black/Red colourway) in all its glory

Over the last year, and especially in the last week, I've chatted with tons of people in the Pebble community. One of the main questions people have is ‘how do I know that my new Pebble watch will continue to work long into the future?’. It’s an extremely valid question and concern - one that I share as a fellow Pebble wearer. I called this out specifically in my blog post announcing the relaunch in January 2025. How is this time round going to be different from last time?

There are two pieces to making Pebble sustainable long term - hardware and software.

Nothing lasts forever, especially an inexpensive gadget like a Pebble. We want to be able to keep manufacturing these watches long into the future - mostly because I will always want one on my wrist! The company I set up to relaunch Pebble, Core Devices, is self funded, built without investors, and extremely lean. As long as we stay profitable (ie we don’t lose money), we will continue to manufacture new watches.

We’re also making sure that our new watches are more repairable than old Pebble watches. The back cover of Pebble Time 2 is screwed in. You can remove the back cover and replace the battery.

We’ve also published electrical and mechanical design files for Pebble 2 Duo. Yes, you can download the schematic (includes KiCad project files) right now on Github! This should give you a nice jumpstart to designing your own PebbleOS-compatible device.

Last time round, barely any of the Pebble software was open source. This made it very hard for the Pebble community to make improvements to their watches after the company behind Pebble shut down. Things are different now! This whole relaunch came about primarily because Google open sourced PebbleOS (thank you!). Yesterday, the software that powers Pebble watches was around 95% open source. As of today, it’s now 100%. This means that if Core Devices were to disappear into a black hole, you have all the source code you need to build, run and improve the software behind your Pebble.

I confess that I misunderstood why 95% was much less sustainable than 100% until recently. I discuss this in more detail in my latest Tick Talk episode (check it out). Long story short - I’m an Android user and was happy to sideload the old Pebble APK on my phone, but iPhone and other Android users have basically been stuck without an easily available Pebble mobile companion app for years.

Here’s how we’re m

Source: HackerNews