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 would’ve 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 hadn’t been able to keep their ancient watches limping along this whole time thanks to Rebble.
On the other hand, it’s 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 you’re putting in, it doesn’t make that thing you’re 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 they’d like.
Both parties currently seem to want the solution to be: one app store, but it’s my app store, which is not sustainable.