[HN Gopher] Google open-sources the Pebble OS
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Google open-sources the Pebble OS
Author : hexxeh
Score : 430 points
Date : 2025-01-27 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (opensource.googleblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (opensource.googleblog.com)
| maxehmookau wrote:
| This is cool! I remember receiving my first Pebble watch on
| kickstarter. I felt like I was in the future!
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| you still will be! In a few!
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| This is pretty awesome. I had a Pebble but the battery went out
| and was sad to see that you had to buy used / refurbished. Being
| epaper and lasting for so long the best part of it was that it
| just managed notifications with my phone. I moved on to the Apple
| Watch from my brother (series 0) and it took awhile for the Apple
| Watch to have its killer application which was a fitness tracker.
| jsheard wrote:
| You can still get watches which use the same MIP display
| technology as the Pebble and run similar "smart-ish" software
| with very long battery life. They tend to be marketed more as
| fitness/sports watches rather than smartwatches though.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| MIP and e-paper are not exactly the same.
|
| I love my transflective MIP Garmin Fenix watch, but it's not
| nearly as high-contrast as my wife's Kindle, which uses a
| reflective MIP e-paper display.
|
| I would be an ideal candidate for a rePebble if I were not as
| happy as I am with my Garmin - though with their recent
| changes to inReach plans, crazy prices and lackluster
| features on the Fenix 8, and trend towards AMOLED displays
| (away from their roots, chasing the Apple watch market)
| they're not looking as amazing as they once did.
| jsheard wrote:
| I think you're mixing up e-paper (generic term for non-
| emissive reflective displays) and e-ink (the trademark for
| a specific type of e-paper display). The Pebble used a MIP
| LCD, just like Coros and Garmins MIP models, it never had
| anything in common with the e-ink displays used on Kindles.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Every Pebble model used an LCD display. It being epaper has to
| be one of the most pervasive myths in tech history. It was a
| low powered, reflective LCD, so it did improve on other LCDs in
| those areas somewhat, but it wasn't eink technology.
| guzik wrote:
| Pebble is still the best and the only watch I've ever owned.
| Nothing has matched its simplicity and functionality for me.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Don't say it often, but this is very nice of Google and they
| really didn't have to.
|
| Credit where it's due
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Yep, that's the kind of thing I would have expected "don't be
| evil" Google from 20 years ago to do. All is not lost.
| skort wrote:
| I don't think you need to give them any credit at all. A
| massive tech behemoth vacuums up a beloved product and then
| find that they can't exploit it for growth and they finally
| spit it back out years later. They've lost money and destroyed
| an ecosystem.
|
| We should be more upset that projects get acquired, shut down,
| and never see the light of day again because these massive
| companies must continue to expand at all costs.
|
| Stop treating mega corporations like they've done you a favor
| when they've done the bare minimum.
| elaus wrote:
| I prefer to shit on companies that don't even do "the bare
| minimum" and never publish source code of their dead
| products. Today, this is not Google.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I'm the first to criticize Google and say they have the
| attention span of a crack addled flea.
|
| But I have to commend them for this.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It feels like they deliberately sat on it until it's almost
| completely dead.
| freedomben wrote:
| Fortunately you don't need to go on your feelings, because
| people involved have told us exactly what happened.
| RePebble guy (Eric) reached out, asked them to open source,
| they spent a ton of effort to get it releasable, and did
| just that.
|
| Unless you think everybody involved is lying.
| creddit wrote:
| Pebble went bankrupt because no one bought their products.
| Their assets were acquired by Fitbit. Fitbit did not continue
| to produce the Pebble products for which there was very
| limited demand. Google then later acquired Fitbit.
| dtquad wrote:
| Big Tech companies acquired and acqu-hired many
| unsustainable small and medium sized businesses in the past
| 16 years. Most people don't know that because seller
| doesn't want to admit they were a bad unsustainable
| business and buyer doesn't want to admit they are buying a
| bad unsustainable business.
| tadfisher wrote:
| They sold 2 million units, which is nothing to sneeze at
| for a Kickstarter-funded project. What they miscalculated
| was the demand for the Pebble Time, for which they spent
| too much money on R&D and marketing to justify the results.
| They should have iterated on the original design, making it
| cheaper, smaller, and longer-lasting. Instead they tried to
| go upmarket and compete with the Apple Watch, with
| predictable results.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| Google didn't "vacuum up" Pebble. Fitbit bought them (after
| they were in financial trouble), Google bought Fitbit later
| so ended up owning the Pebble source code after that.
|
| As the top voted comment on the article says, Google didn't
| have to do this. It's probably driven by only a few people
| internally there, and if everyone's cynical and nasty about
| it, they're less likely to try doing the nice thing again
| next time. That isn't a good outcome.
| dtquad wrote:
| >We should be more upset that projects get acquired, shut
| down, and never see the light of day again because these
| massive companies must continue to expand at all costs.
|
| >Stop treating mega corporations like they've done you a
| favor when they've done the bare minimum.
|
| Most of the projects that got acquired and acqu-hired by
| mega-corporations were bad unsustainable businesses.
| bombcar wrote:
| Many, MANY acquihires are just someone at a large company
| being nice.
|
| Google should get credit for this, _especially_ if you
| think it 's the bare minimum - to encourage others to do
| similar things.
| sushid wrote:
| They didn't have to do this. They didn't even acquire Pebble
| outright, they acquired it through Fitbit, and Pebble was
| just a part of Fitbit's portfolio from a previous
| acquisition.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| Yes and no. They did buy it and just let it die. They were so
| far ahead of the competition at the time.
| devrand wrote:
| It was dead long before Google was involved. Pebble filed for
| insolvency back in 2016 with Fitbit acquiring much of the
| assets. It was dead at this point. 5 years later Google
| bought Fitbit.
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| Looks like there is money in the business of hyped-dying
| startups. First Pebble, then Beeper, and now Pebble again.
| cortesoft wrote:
| They bought Fitbit, not pebble
| jsheard wrote:
| They've open sourced what they _can,_ but these third party bits
| had to be stripped out:
|
| _- All of the system fonts
|
| - The Bluetooth stack, except for a stub that will function in an
| emulator
|
| - The STM peripheral library
|
| - The voice codec
|
| - ARM CMSIS
|
| - For the Pebble 2 HR, the heart rate monitor driver_
| jacoblambda wrote:
| > - ARM CMSIS
|
| It's worth noting that CMSIS itself is open source but some of
| the drivers for this hardware probably were not.
| bri3d wrote:
| Old versions of CMSIS had a weird "only for use with ARM
| hardware" license header, which also carried through into
| most BSPs. I don't think this was resolved until around CMSIS
| 4, so it might just be a matter of front porting since it
| looks like normal STM32 stuff which is mostly permissively
| licensed now.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Yeah. And ngl porting up to newer versions of CMSIS isn't
| too terribly hard. I'm looking at porting up to CMSIS 6
| soon and it doesn't look like it'll be that bad either.
| rvz wrote:
| Give credit where credit is due, at least Google gives back to
| the community.
|
| Well done.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| Well, better would have been investing in it and making it
| better. At least they didn't produce some awful spy on you
| thing that had nothing to do with p and called it pebble
| ryukafalz wrote:
| As a Pebble user to this day (I'm wearing one right now in fact)
| this is amazing! I'm hopeful that this leads to development and
| fixes on these old devices that haven't been possible until now.
|
| And who knows, maybe we could even see new smartwatches running a
| derivative of the Pebble OS at some point? The old hardware's
| great but since they're not being made anymore it's only a matter
| of time before they break down.
|
| Props to Google on this.
| fsflover wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017
| erohead wrote:
| Thank you, Google. You didn't have to, but you did. We are all
| are extraordinarily grateful.
|
| I wrote a blog post about our plans to bring Pebble back,
| sustainably. https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-
| back
|
| We got our original start on HN
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3827868), it's a pleasure
| to be back.
|
| If you're interested in getting a new Pebble, check out
| https://rePebble.com
| Latty wrote:
| I did wear my Pebble until it died, and then never found
| another smart watch worth it for me. Will keep an eye on this
| for sure.
| ashirviskas wrote:
| May I ask why it was so special for you? As I did not
| participate in all the hype and now I'm a happy owner of a
| Garmin watch and it does seem like it is closer in specs to
| Pebble than most other smartwatches. Other than the openness.
| coldpie wrote:
| Is the Small Android Phone project dead? :)
| rpmisms wrote:
| Would be a great hardware duo. Neo-pebble and Mini-nexus.
| coldpie wrote:
| Hmm, maybe we can come at this from the other angle. We
| can't have small phones because bigger is always better,
| right? So how about a HUGE 5" screen smartwatch that just
| happens to be a perfectly functional standalone phone if
| you discard the wristband?? Instant best seller!
| Zigurd wrote:
| A better use of flexible screens than folding devices.
| Fitting under the cuffs of men's shirts is a constraint.
| I dictate most text entered on my phone, so a squishy
| typing surface wouldn't be so bad. Camera position could
| be tricky.
| mcny wrote:
| Problem is different people want different things. I for
| one want at least all day battery while using only about
| 60% of the capacity so realistically two full days
| battery from a single charge. I then want to be able to
| set a max charge limit of 80% beyond which the phone
| won't charge and have the phone die at 20%. Ideally, I
| also want the phone to be able to work off the wall
| meaning if the phone is plugged in to the wall, it should
| use power from the wall and not constantly charge and
| discharge the battery.
| erohead wrote:
| No, but...not moving fast
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Which Pebble are you bringing back? I ask because Pebble 2 was
| the sweet spot for me with a heart rate monitor but the heart
| rate monitor is not in this repo.
| Philpax wrote:
| They don't have permission to open-source that code:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845102
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I know. That is why I'm asking which Pebble. Nothing is
| stopping them from writing a heart rate driver but I don't
| know what the plan is.
| hexxeh wrote:
| The HRM aspect is mostly a small binary blob that ought to be
| fairly straightforward to re-integrate. The far larger issue
| is the lack of a Bluetooth stack.
| zamalek wrote:
| This is really unfortunate for the existing users,
| especially given their profound loyalty. However, more
| modern chips have all of this loaded in a bootloader of
| sorts (e.g. nRF softdevices), so the project could prevent
| the RF driver nonsense going forward.
| cmdtab wrote:
| This is pretty cool. Have you ever thought about designing
| pebble to look more like a traditional watch but e-ink based?
| girvo wrote:
| That's basically what the Pebble Time Round was, and it was
| phenomenal!
| organsnyder wrote:
| I backed a Pebble Time Round Gold on the last Kickstarter,
| which was cancelled when Pebble was acquired. Somehow the
| devices ended up on Amazon, and I snagged one there. It's a
| phenomenally stylish device.
| girvo wrote:
| My white 20mm one with a brown leather band started more
| conversations than anything else I've ever owned and
| used, which was surprising but neat :)
|
| Unfortunately mine got stolen and broken, which is a
| shame. I wonder how hard they are to buy today, and how
| difficult battery replacements for them are...
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Pebble Time used an LCD display just like every other
| Pebble
| girvo wrote:
| Quite, but a transflective one (from Sharp, I believe)
| which gave it a lot of the benefits of daylight
| readability while being much much easier to program for
| and work with.
| Gigachad wrote:
| At the cost of looking very dull and washed out.
| AgentMatrixAI wrote:
| forgot the name of the watch but it had an lcd display to
| save battery and a full touchscreen around 2017? i ended up
| using the lcd display mostly for HB and walk distance. it
| would be great if we had a completely e-ink based pebble
| watch with backlighting (lcd display was great but couldn't
| be viewed in the dark :/)
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing threads:
|
| _We 're bringing Pebble back_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091 - Jan 2025 (1
| comment)
|
| _The future of Rebble_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 - Jan 2025 (3
| comments)
| bberenberg wrote:
| Happy to hear about this. My mood tracker [0] for Pebble was
| the only one that has ever worked for me. Would love to have a
| comeback.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37221576
| maxyurk wrote:
| the site asks if you want a new pebble and if you click "no"
| you're redirected to apple watch website LMAO
| freedomben wrote:
| Neat, I'm super excited! I've hoped the PineTime would be the
| new Pebble, but hasn't really materialized (though, it has
| gotten pretty good! despite being a little awkward).
|
| I actually held off from buying a Pebble back in the day
| because the software wasn't open source and I was worried about
| getting dependent on a product I had no control over. (Yes, I
| see the vicious Tragedy of the Commons wrapped up there, but
| still gotta make the optimal choice for me). I'm beyond stoked
| to see this movement! And it being open source, I have no such
| qualms. If they are affordable enough, I'll probably be gifting
| these out on the regular so expect to sell at least a dozen or
| two :-D
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| There is apparently huge amounts of goodwill for Pebble!
|
| But. Isn't most of the value of a codebase like this not the
| code itself, but all the knowledge of the people who worked on
| it day to day? Where are they?
|
| It's really intriguing. People who have a lot of goodwill
| towards Pebble BELIEVE the source code is valuable. That
| doesn't mean that it is.
| skort wrote:
| Hopefully this will accelerate the production of new hardware at
| some point. I misplaced my old Pebble Time and was excited for
| the Pebble Time 2 but those hopes were dashed when they closed up
| and fitbit had no interest in continuing to produce the watches
| that made Pebble what it was.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Hardware is hard to almost impossible as a sustainable business
| as a small company unless there is a thriving ODM market and
| you can just use your own software.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Are there any applications that are also open sourced? They
| mention snowy but it is giving a 404: https://github.com/pebble-
| dev/snowy
| tucnak wrote:
| To somebody who's completely out of the loop, hears about Pebble
| for the first time--why is this big news? Are we going to see
| novel software written for defunct hardware, or is the hardware
| going to evolve now that the software is open?
| Philpax wrote:
| People really like their Pebble watches, and this will help
| keep them alive into the future. In some future, we may see new
| hardware produced that could use some derivative of the
| resulting operating system.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| It's one of the original smart watches. What really sets it
| apart from modern ones is the e-ink display and dead simple
| interface (just a few buttons, no touchscreen). This simplicity
| means that it continues to do what it does well and doesn't
| really feel like it has aged badly. Certainly I would rather
| wear a pebble than a gen 1 Samsung watch or moto360.
|
| It's a delightful bit of kit that was sadly abandoned by owner
| and it's nice that they are open-sourcing a dead product
| instead of just leaving it to rot like so many other
| electronics are.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The pebble did not have an e ink display, It was just a low
| power LCD.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Still have my Pebble watch from 10 years ago in a drawer
| somewhere. Great watch, good times.
|
| I'm back to a "classic" analog watch as I realized I don't really
| want notifications. But I might buy a smart watch (probably Apple
| watch at this point since I have a bunch of iOS hardware) for the
| health features (HR, EKG, etc.)
| bix6 wrote:
| Can anyone comment on Google's Business reasons for doing this?
| Is this actually an act of goodwill or is this a commodity,
| antitrust, etc. play?
| coldpie wrote:
| Given the original Pebble folks are using this to spin up a re-
| launch ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845185 ), my
| guess is the Pebble folks just know someone on the inside at
| Google who managed to get the lawyers to sign off on it.
| bombcar wrote:
| From my experience in large (and small) companies, trying to
| get something that is internally dead open sourced is usually
| not a huge fight against people saying no, just a laundry-
| list of things that need to be done before everyone will sign
| off on it.
|
| One motivated person at a decently high enough level can get
| it pushed through, as long as whoever the person making the
| decision asks about it says, 'eh, ok.'
| j45 wrote:
| Big news. It was so good. Now a new group of people will get to
| consider it.
| atYevP wrote:
| Lets go!
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Managed to post my comment after dang moved the comments to this
| thread, so reposting here:
|
| Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the
| accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so
| beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily
| a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart
| functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that
| also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had
| a sort of similar trajectory:
|
| Bought by Intel, then killed two years later after a battery
| related recall issue.
|
| It was, in my opinion, by far the best fitness tracker watch
| ever, and remains so to this day. Not so much because of it's
| actual features (which were relatively standard), but the
| software paradigm of simple yet effective exercise gamification
| that helped encourage exercise habit formation. 8 years later and
| I still miss it.
| glietu wrote:
| This really made my day!
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Just curious, I'm not good with C. Here in the code,
| https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/main/src/libc/alloca.c...
|
| From what I googled, this is just for stack allocation in gcc.
| Does that mean Pebble only has stack allocation?
| Cieric wrote:
| Alloca is allocations on the stack, seems the kernel might be
| stack based, but the os itself has it's own implementation of
| malloc. Which is heap based.
| https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/main/src/libos/include...
|
| I'm also seeing references to rtos as the true underlying os
| though.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks found it,
|
| https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/main/src/fw/kernel/pbl.
| ..
|
| Which calls heap malloc:
|
| https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/main/src/libutil/heap..
| ..
| tesseract wrote:
| It was based on FreeRTOS, but FreeRTOS at the time was
| extremely bare bones and only provided a preemptive
| scheduler, task management, and synchronization primitives.
| Everything else (memory management, I/O, ...) had to come
| either from whatever libc implementation was in use, or be
| built from scratch.
| andybak wrote:
| This, Google Wave, Tilt Brush (and more recently Blocks). And
| probably others I've forgotten.
|
| This really does help mitigate the damage done by "Killed by
| Google" and people are genuinely grateful (personally in my
| case).
|
| But even better would be to fix the dysfunctional internal
| dynamics that cause this syndrome in what appears to be
| disproportionally more frequently compared to other corporations.
| talldayo wrote:
| Eh, I take a much more "gloves off" approach to this mentality.
| If you bought an Airport thinking that it would be your forever
| router, you're a moron. Same goes for buying an eero, or Google
| Home, or even an iPad at this point. You don't own this
| hardware, you control nothing about it. The idea that products
| live forever is a bedtime story we tell ourselves, an utter
| fairytale of the software industry.
|
| Everyone kills software products. The problem is our attitude
| of entitlement towards things we sign an EULA to use. You "own"
| TikTok on the App Store? Pssh, please. You don't even own the
| software runtime you use TikTok with.
| abhishekjha wrote:
| Aren't floating point comparisons frowned upon?
| https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/main/src/libc/math/flo...
|
| I guess you can freeze some compiler options to give you
| consistent results.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've only done a little bit of arduino programming, but for
| that you had to import a whole library for floating point math
| which took a huge amount of space, and many chips didn't even
| have hardware support for it.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| People passing cynical comments at Google need to understand that
| at a big co like Google, something like this doesn't 'just
| happen'. It probably happened because some passionate L6/L7
| engineer wanted to do it and pushed through the bureaucracy to
| get approvals for it, probably largely on their own time (by
| which I mean that this was at best a side-project for them and at
| worst a distraction that was losing them favor with their
| bosses). At every point in the process, they probably had to
| justify what they were doing to their leads, to lawyers, to
| privacy reviewers, who had no real stake in it and so had nothing
| to lose by saying No. They almost certainly won't receive any
| career progress out of this and would risk a setback if something
| slips through the cracks (such as some unredacted proprietary
| information).
|
| They did it because they felt it was the right thing to do. Good
| things happen through the actions of individuals like this. We
| should acknowledge and celebrate it when they do, anti-big-tech
| cynicism can wait.
| jayde2767 wrote:
| Maybe...the cynic in me says that someone feels this needs to
| be preserved because it will become another Google relic in
| favor of something newer, or more shiny. Or likely something
| written in Go...just a guess on my part...
| frosting1337 wrote:
| What do you mean? Pebble was dead before Google ever bought
| Fitbit.
| nialv7 wrote:
| I do wonder how they successfully justified this to the higher
| ups. If anything, I would like to learn from them so I can
| better justify the things I want to do..
| pyuser583 wrote:
| How much work is being done in the RTOS space? I would think a
| lot, but then I hear programmers complain it's not worth it.
|
| Are RTOSs still the future?
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