I understand that the watch operating system is open source. However, it seems that the watch will connect to a companion smartphone app. Do you know if the app is a requirement and/or if the app will be open source?

Garmin watches come close?

From what I've read from Eric since this relaunch was announced, he just wants a new pebble and so do some of the userbase. This project isn't really intended as a viable, polished product. Rather it's a niche thing made for a Core audience of nerds.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the nerds this is intended for. I instantly pre-ordered a watch because it's a pebble. I7

PebbleOS was awesome, though. Such a well thought out system for end-users, and it already has tons of apps. Developing for it (in C!) is also super easy because it has an amazing SDK.

Because good software is hard. The PebbleOS is a gem, and no, no one could in 9 years.

I pre ordered, and I'm usually annoyingly loud about not pre-ordering. That being said, i love my pebble time. I Kickstarted it back in the day, and it still works but the battery is weak. I could replace the battery, but i want more devices like this, so I'll put some money in and eat Ramen for a few weeks.

Withings

Having used both, personally I highly preferred the Pebble over the Bangle JS.

Pebble was solid software, good designs and it all just worked simply and did what I needed. I also thought the Pebble Time Round was near perfect in design and execution. I'm not a fan of the geeky look of the normal pebble and bangle watches (or the apple watch look).

The Bangle was fun to dev for, and I love that it exists, but it all felt like a dev project. Not a finished product. Granted it was early on in the project so I'm sure it's in a better place now.

They both have similar capabilities. I say go with whichever you think is going to fit what you need a smartwatch to do.

I use my autopebble with tasker. Scripted a few things, like find my phone, load my audiobook, messages, etc. Used to have Google Home messages and lights and stuff, but I stopped using smarthome stuff for the most part. Mostly I use it for music control and weather and time though.

I also scripted a weird one that I could enter my feeling level at work throughout the day (1-10) and based on the average at tthe end tasker would play one of three songs when I got in my car at the end of work (only within a time range and if bluetooth was connected to car)

Google dumped the Pebble OS code on GitHub when this whole "rePebble" thing (not Rebble) started. Now there's a new phone app coming out soon (or out now, depending on your platform and abilities) that handles old and new Pebbles and modern phone platforms.

None of this is from Google.

...and now its owned by google so thats shit as well.

Google acquired it back in 2021, this move to open source it is a good thing.

I think Google just owns the software because the product page for these watches say the guy invested his own money to get these produced.

due to Pebble selling out to Fitbit.

Due to Pebble going bankrupt, and managing to sell its software assets to Fitbit to gain just enough money to refund the kickstarter pledges and pay off it's biggest debts.