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Comment by ignobleParting | Hacker News Reader

Pebble was a terrible device, and riddled with horrble design decisions.

From the word “go” you knew Pebble was trying to lock you in, register and count you as a user, log demographic information about you, and tether that information to unique device identifiers.

You could not simply use Pebble as a watch, if so desired. Pebble enforced specific behaviors onto the user.

For example, you couldn’t just like the looks of the watch, buy it, take it out of the box, wear it, and use it to tell time. No.

Open the box, and the watch directs you to an internet connection, so it can phone home to the mothership. Really? Really?

To me, that reeks of exploitation, and the goal was never to provide people with a good watch that does stuff. Open the box, and push people around. Make them clap their hands and sing along.

Sorry guys. You made serious mistakes. People notice. Good riddance.

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I am extremely skeptical that this is the reason Pebble failed. Most consumers are not privacy oriented, and all of the major competitors in the market require the same activation process that Pebble "forced" onto users. If you wanted a watch that doesn't forcefully tether you to a phone, you didn't want a smartwatch.

That’s funny, because I’M a consumer, and I’m TELLING you that’s what I want in a smart watch. I guess I just don’t exist. Hilariously, neither does the Pebble.

Yes, that is why I said most consumers, not all consumers. I am sorry Pebble did not fit your use case, but it is a tad hyperbolic to assume that is why the company failed or that your ethical requirements represents the majority of consumers. As a Pebble developer and extremely active member of the community I can assure you that isn't the case.

Look at how the watch’s community failed to grow beyond certain limits, and how small the community remained, despite insistent proclamations that the device is well-designed. I think that speaks for itself.

Honestly it failed to grow with general consumers but it's been a pretty huge it with those who know about it. I got one for my wife and she loved it but literally nobody knew what it was and most people mistook it for an Apple watch.

It's a smartwatch -- the watch didn't have a full OS installed when you first turn it on. It's meant to be paired with a phone. If you just want a watch without smart features then just get a watch. This complaint is ridiculous and nobody who owned a Pebble would take it seriously.

Pebble failed because they needed better marketing, took VC money so they needed to grow fast, and focused on unnecessary hardware addons that nobody wanted (smart straps).

There are still plenty of people buying out the remaining Pebble hardware. It was a good device and pretty good ecosystem.

> and focused on unnecessary hardware addons that nobody wanted (smart straps).

Frankly, for me the "nobody wanted" part was the fitness focus - I initially got my Pebble precisely because they didn't try the sports angle like everyone else, but instead went for a hacker-friendly device and architecture. I'm not even sure if they put much resources into smartstraps - they just added and described a communication protocol. It wouldn't surprise me if this was just repackaging of a debugging functionality they needed.

It's hard for me to say where things went wrong. Maybe they just tried to grow too fast.

Actually the part general consumers wanted was the fitness part -- this is what put them seriously behind other more poorly designed watches like the Fitbit. They didn't see the fitness angle until it was too late.

Certainly there's no reason why a fitness angle had to interfere with the hacker-friendly architecture.

I remember reading a post mortem interview of th founder around these lines, but can't find it anymore. They went all-in on the fitness thing when they found out the big market was there, thinking of it as their last chance for survival. Ironically I think that was what killed them in the end. Since they had a very loyal customer base (yes maybe not very big but enough so every kickstarter they launched was a massive success) they probably could have lived aside Fitbit, Apple etc. Reducing their burn rate by focussing on their market segment (productivity watch) and not trying to launch several products every year would probably have kept them afloat.

Unfortunately since they took VC money they couldn't just sit by and be a small player with a loyal customer base. That would have been the ideal position for them and could have kept them going for a long time. But that doesn't satisfy their investors that wanted to see a high return on their investment.

They never even really got their fitness side off the ground before they died. The Pebble 2 was their first fitness focused watch and they were already dead when it came out.

The Pebble Round with a heart-rate monitor would have sold like hotcakes to women with the right marketing.

If you’re selling me something, and you call it a “kind-of-thing” I want it to be an actual thing first and a “smart kind of thing” second.

Pebble was kind of not a thing. A little too smart for its own good.

It's a smart watch -- a watch that is smart. If you don't want the smart bit, just get a watch. I'm not sure why this is so surprising. What did you want it to do?

No. Wrong. If I don’t want the smart bit, the device’s degradation into an ordinary version of a watch should be graceful, and without barriers or punishment.

I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand and design toward. Why would anyone buy something that bricks itself if one refuses to play the mother-may-i game?

Bricks itself? You can run the watch untethered if you want, it even has a perfectly serviceable airplane mode.

It’s shipped in a locked state. A factory reset reverts it to that locked state. The device is rendered inoperable through a factory reset by design.

You need a remote server to reactivate this watch. If you try to reset the watch, erase your own private information, and sell it, the person that receives it will need to engage in some problem solving to reactivate it. Or they’ll demand a refund, because they don’t know what to do, to reactivate a watch that can’t validate its own existence.

I agree devices should let you use their offline functions without remote activation - a featurephone owning friend wanted a Fitbit and the one we picked was reviewed as "does not require a smartphone". She couldn't do anything with it before installing a desktop utility to activate it.

Actually you don't. When the servers go offline in June, you'll still be able to update the watch. You will still need a phone running Pebble software to do it but since most of the functionality requires a phone with that software anyway this isn't much of a loss.

Pebble has done very well by it's customers for a company that didn't exist anymore. They definitely put in 110% to make sure nobody is left with a brick -- they didn't have to do that. The lights are off and nobody is there anymore. Honestly, given how much they've done I find you complaints even more misplaced.

The tenacity of this evasive posturing is pretty tedious. I suppose the odds of some non-technical user wiping their phone or destroying it, thus losing their last working copy of the app (after Pebble’s IP is dropped from the walled-garden markets and itunes app store), combined with the need to perform a factory reset on their watch is, somehow to be regarded as a six sigma impossibility, yes?

Turning off Bluetooth and uninstalling the app (or stopping it from running in the background) after the initial update worked just fine when I tried it.

Not sure why you’d want that, though.

The vast majority of users will buy a smartwatch expecting it to be smart, so giving them instructions for how to enable those features seems logical to me.

>lock you in

Wait, how?

>demographic information

...which is optional?

  after the initial update

See, there’s your problem.

  Wait, how?

The decision to ship the watch in an inoperable state is coercive.

  optional?

Still, this is a dark pattern. Forcing the conversation represents an inductive stance. Going in blind, the user has to judge whether they should yes-to-death (at their own risk) a lengthy sequence of interview questions, to explore further, or attempt to reject the possibly optional activities, and feel the tug of a leash later on. The preferred behavior is obvious. Do you defy the preference? What ramifications will that have?

Unboxing it, you find there are strings attached, puppeting your actions.

> The decision to ship the watch in an inoperable state is coercive.

Actually it's merely practical; the OS ships with a known save OS that's capable of booting up and connecting to Bluetooth to get an update. It's also the OS that it reverts to if it gets stuck in a boot loop.

It's a perfectly reasonable engineering choice.

No, it’s pretty unreasonable, and obviously a business decision.

Got any facts?

Your opinion regarding the descriptive qualifier of this problem as an “engineering” problem, thus special (a no-true-scotsman) and exempt from all other requirements certainly isn’t based on facts. You first.

But hey, choices are choices. Feel free to make as many bad decisions as you like. How many replies have I put forward? How many obstinate retorts are there? Read them all and listen or don’t.

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