When Eric Migicovsky and his new company, Core Devices, popped up, there was a lot of new excitement for the Pebble ecosystem again. The folks at Rebble, who have painstakingly maintained the Pebble App Store for the last nine years, initially joined in that excitement. However, the situation has soured.

Last month, Rebble highlighted its agreement with Core Devices, the company producing new Pebble smartwatches. Rebble would focus on the web services they’ve lovingly maintained, and Core would handle the new hardware. It sounded like the perfect partnership, but that optimistic vision seems to be already crumbling.

What’s going on?

Here’s the deal: the Pebble App Store that can be found on the new Core watches is 100% Rebble’s data and the result of nearly a decade of community effort. When Pebble went under nine years ago, Rebble and the Pebble community banded together to save what was left of the app store. It has kept original Pebble watches functional all this time. They built a replacement API, a storage backend, and spent years curating, updating, and hosting that data. As you can imagine, this hasn’t been cheap to do.

That brings us to 2025. Rebble says it has been in negotiations with Migicovsky for months, and it’s willing to compromise on almost everything—except for one thing: there has to be a future for Rebble. The team is happy to continue maintaining the web services and allow Core to build new features. However, Rebble wants a guarantee that Core won’t take its hard work and go build a proprietary, walled garden app store around it.

Core won’t commit

Those are the terms Rebble is offering, but apparently, Core Devices does not see it the same way. Rebble says Migicovsky wants unrestricted access to all the data they’ve archived and curated. As mentioned, this would allow him to build a Core-only App Store, replace Rebble, and make any new changes proprietary, leaving out the community entirely. Rebble says it has asked him repeatedly to guarantee that he won’t do this, but he has refused to put it in writing.

To make matters worse, this is apparently not an isolated incident. When the original PebbleOS source code was released earlier this year, the Rebble community started porting an open-source Bluetooth stack to support original devices. Rebble paid for this work, and Migicovsky took it as a base for the commercial watches. Then, when Core forked PebbleOS away from public maintainership in June, it promised to merge back periodically. It’s now November, and that hasn’t happened once.

The current Core Devices mobile app is literally based on work that was performed by the Rebble community and funded through the Rebble Grants program. Rebble plainly states, “Core took Rebble’s work, added to it, and then paid us back by putting a more restrictive license on their contributions and wrapping a closed-source UI around it.”

Two weeks ago, Rebble says that Migicovsky demanded unrestricted access to all of its curated data. When it asked for a conversation, he delayed it. Since then, Rebble’s logs show that he went ahead and scraped the app store anyway, violating their previous agreement.

What now?

Rebble says that it has two options to address the situation going forward. It could aggressively protect its work with an ugly legal fight or let Migicovsky do whatever he wants and risk the community’s work falling under a closed-source umbrella.

Of course, Rebble would like to avoid either of those options. The ideal path forward would be for Rebble and Core to commit to a legal partnership. This would allow Rebble to continue its work on the web services side of things, while Core builds the hardware. However, Rebble is interested in hearing from the community about what it should do. They’re urging people to leave comments on r/pebble, Discord, and to email the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors directly.

As a long-time fan of Pebble watches, I’ve used Rebble and can personally vouch for how amazing it is. Pebble devices were abandoned nearly a decade ago, but a devout community has kept them alive all on their own. It would be a shame if Core doesn’t work with them.

Source: Rebble

UPDATE: Migicovsky responds

Eric Migicovsky has taken to his blog to respond to Rebble. You are encouraged to read the full post, as well as Rebble’s full post linked above, but here is Migicovsky’s tl;dr:

Core Devices is a small company I started in 2025 to relaunch Pebble and build new Pebble smartwatches. Rebble is a non-profit organization that has supported the Pebble community since 2017. Rebble has done a ton of great work over the years and deserves recognition and support for that.

Core Devices and Rebble negotiated an agreement where Core would pay $0.20/user/month to support Rebble services. But the agreement broke down after over the following disagreement.

Rebble believes that they ‘100%’ own the data of the Pebble Appstore. They’re attempting to create a walled garden around 13,000 apps and faces that individual Pebble developers created and uploaded to the Pebble Appstore between 2012 and 2016. Rebble later scraped this data in 2017.

I disagree. I’m working hard to keep the Pebble ecosystem open source. I believe the contents of the Pebble Appstore should be freely available and not controlled by one organization.

Rebble posted a blog post yesterday with a bunch of false accusations, and in this post I speak to each of them.