Continuing the discussion from Gadgetbridge compatible Smartwatch with good sleep and health tracking?:
Core Devices response:
I talked about this a bit on Mastodon yesterdayâŚ
I have come away from this not really being a fan of either side, which is a shame since I have a Pebble Time 2 pre-order in.
âŚbut I now see there are a lot of Pebble-related discussions here, so I thought this should be shared. It seems like an unfortunate situation all-around to me.
The comment section on Erics blog is gold. 
I donât really give a shit about any of this. I just want my watch to work, and work well. Please everyone involved, get your heads out of your asses and work together.
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So, Eric wants Rebble to share the archive of the Pebble App Store, but Rebble is afraid that that would compromise their independence? Iâm honestly confused at everything thatâs going on.
Not withstanding their false accusations of theft, the crux of our disagreement is the archive of 13,000 Pebble apps and watchfaces that were uploaded to the Pebble Appstore in July 2018 before it was shut down.
I believe that these apps and watchfaces should be archived publicly and freely accessible by anyone. They should not held behind a walled garden by one organization. I repeatedly advocated for hosting this data on a neutral 3rd party like Archive.org.
Rebble believes âthe data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% Rebbleâ (this is a direct quote from their blog post). They repeatedly refer to all watchfaces and watchapps as âour dataâ.
This is just plainly false. The apps and watchfaces were originally uploaded by individual developers to an appstore run by a company that no longer exists. These folks created beautiful work and shared them freely with the Pebble community. Iâve spoken with numerous Pebble app developers about this. After the fall of Pebble Tech Corp, none of them envisioned one single organization claiming ownership of their work and restricting access, or charging money for access.
Rebble did directly reply to that. If I am understanding the he said / she said of it allâŚ
but what he doesnât say is that Rebble paid for the work that he took as a base for his commercial watches!
I do enjoy that Rebble is letting popular demand decide if they should proceed with a lawsuit. I would of preferred they do it by round of applause but to each their ownâŚ
This is kind of what I mean, I think both sides are severely misjudging what people actually want here. Eric would have nothing at all were it not for Rebble and the FOSS community maintaining old Pebble devices for like a decade.
0% chance he wouldâve launched Core at all without Rebble, and even if he did nobody would care because everyone would have moved on to something else in the meantime if they hadnât been able to keep their ancient watches limping along this whole time thanks to Rebble.
On the other hand, itâs crazy that Rebble seems to think of themselves and their services as the only community and the only way that apps should be distributed on new Pebble devices. Rebble has clearly put in a lot of time into archiving a ton of old Pebble-era work for this long, but the sad thing about archiving is that at the end of the day no matter how much preservation work youâre putting in, it doesnât make that thing youâre archiving yours.
Honestly, Eric came prepared with receipts in his post that ultimately make Rebble look pretty bad.
What Core Devices really needs to do is separate PebbleOS into its own independent project and give it to someone like the Linux Foundation or Apache (which I think Eric has previously suggested in a blog), and PebbleOS should have APIs to interact with any companion app.
Then Core Devices can have their own mobile app with their own app store that they do whatever they want with, and Rebble can have their own mobile app/store with all that archived work, and⌠who knows, maybe Gadgetbridge would be able to implement even greater support/functionality for those products.
And people could pick and choose or even use any combination of software theyâd like.
Both parties currently seem to want the solution to be: one app store, but itâs my app store, which is not sustainable.
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I think the problem with this proposal though is that Rebble doesnât seem to want to make their own app, seeing as they didnât do so for 9 years which never made much sense to me. Rebble just wants someone (Core) to make new hardware & firmware while they release all the software, which clearly isnât a workable arrangement.
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Ah the mythical âFOSSâ spirit when money comes into play! Unfortunately, benevolent dictators should not be the norm in this space.
Iâm glad that when I was tempted to buy this, I did not give in as I dont really like to wear watches.
So much drama but I donât have enough time to pay attention to it.
This reinforces the âdont pre-orderâ mentality that I have.
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My take:
- FOSS software is not sustainable, hence Rebble being upset of not getting a bigger piece of the cake is unfortunate but how hard you work does not correlate to how sustainable you are,
software != hardware - Eric chimes in with the technical knowledge to deliver a great device that promises to work well, while being thankful to the Rebble team
- now, Rebble should understand that they are unfortunately still a third party in here and should take Ericâs offer, nobody owes anything to Rebble
In my case, since we do have MicroPebble and GadgetBridge, I donât really care about the rest.
Let me run my thing with no cloud, or my own self-hosted services.
I meanwhile agree:
- Core devices might just die some day, then the average person will be sad that their thing might not connect easily to a remote server, but if you can run your own thing on it, thatâs a no-problem IMO
- working hard hurts when you realize that someones takes most of the cake away, but can you blame Eric of doing a great product and being good at his job? Not really, just the reality of things[1]. Still, Eric is very much correct on his communication and propositions IMO.
- in an ideal world, nobody should rely on a store in the first place and everybody should just use the Obtainium way from their own Github but itâs hard to get visibility thoâŚ
maybe some communities will do weekly showcases of latest Pebble apps from individuals or have some kind of awesome listsomewhere?
At the end of the day, I donât really care.
Gimme a cool watch that last more than 3 days and where I can tinker and hack cool things by owning the thing with no BS subscription. 
software can be written by somebody else, your code is not unique and you should just accept it, especially given AIâs rise latelyâŚbeen there myself âŠď¸
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