Written by 
Pebble, one of the original Kickstarter darlings from over a decade ago that helped launch the world of smartwatches through its unique e-paper display and handling of notifications, has been absent from our attention for a number of years. After releasing several products, Pebble fell out of the spotlight following the industry essentially folding to the Apple Watch, and they were eventually purchased by Fitbit, who basically shut everything down.
Today, things are weirdly changing for those who are big fans of Pebble or who wished after the Fitbit acquisition that there would be another model to attach to your wrist. Since Google now owns Fitbit, the folks at Mountain View have had the Pebble name and its operating system tucked in a closet somewhere collecting dust. And that’s where today’s news comes in – Google has knocked that dust off PebbleOS and open sourced it.
Since having software open sourced doesn’t meant new watches, you might be wondering where else this story will lead, because it has to go somewhere else, right? It does! The founder of Pebble, Eric Migicovsky, is going to try and use this open-sourced PebbleOS and make new watches for it to run on.
You may recall recently hearing from Eric, as he was the guy behind that Beeper app that tried to bring iMessage to Android, only to have Apple cut him off at every turn. He sold Beeper to Automattic last year and has apparently already left the company to do whatever else guys like him do. For now, that’s re-launching Pebble in some form.
In a blog post, Migicovsky says that he has thought about making a new smartwatch over the years, but understands that the key to a great smartwatch is software, not necessarily the hardware. Because building out a new software to run on watches could take years to do, he instead asked Google if they would open source it. And they did. You can find it here, plus a blog post from Google about doing so here.
Migicovsky is putting together a small team to make some new hardware that runs PebbleOS. So yeah, former Pebble lovers, you may soon have another Pebble smartwatch to buy and wear.
You can keep up with the story and progress at repebble.com.