I will say first that as it concerns the Pebble:
I react my statement. (Can’t edit now, sorry.) Ugh, I made a decent effort to find what I was talking about, but you sure wrote a lot of mentions about Pebble. :-) All I have to go on is an increasingly faulty middle-aged memory, despite your giving me a handy list of posts, so I’ll leave it be.
As for the weather app, it might very well have been sponsored. But here’s the thing: despite my critical comments above, I still take you as a person of integrity even for sponsorships. Now maybe that’s just naive of me (I grew up on Paul Harvey, I should know better), but even if you’re paid I just assume you tried the product and said, “yeah, I can sincerely praise that.” Naive or not, I just know that when I downloaded it, my first thought was “no way Gruber’s seen this running, it’s horrible and I’m not nearly the font and design nut he is. That, and the forecast looks like it’s for Florida, not Seattle.” Again, maybe that’s on me: it was an ad, clearly labeled as an ad, caveat emptor. Made a good faith effort to find my purchases in the App Store to back this up, but Apple apparently isn’t going to make that easy on me.
Finally, had I even suspected you might see this I probably would have not used a Dvorak comparison. I meant it to mean “can go on a rant, but a rant that’ll be worth consideration; whether you agree or not”, but that was Dvorak 30 years ago. I truly do enjoy reading what you write, and do read every post, and that comparison was unfair.