Getting Ready for Rebble | Hacker News Reader

Getting Ready for Rebble

rebble.io

33 pointsgrepular8 comments

Basically, Fitbit are shutting down the Pebble servers today. Peoples watches will continue to work but they wont be able to control apps using voice anymore and they wont be able to install new apps.

They've been working with Rebble.io to hand over services. They're not ready yet, but you may want to sign up to rebble.io before pebble goes away today in order to transfer your data across.

I knew nothing about this deadline until this morning when I got an app update for the Pebble app on my phone and I read the listed changes.

Kinda surprised Rebble.io doesn't explain this on their website. I had no idea what it was looking at the top of the page.

FYI, the timing in this comment is out. I actually submitted this post and made this comment yesterday, about 24 hours before it is suggesting. Apparently the post was put in the "second-chance pool" by HN and resubmitted. So, the deadline has passed now.

That said, it's still worth knowing about Rebble. Once their services go live, you will apparently just be able to click a link on your phone, and the Pebble app will be re-configured to talk to the Rebble servers.

Has the deadline actually passed? Looks like the Pebble servers are still live as I type this (Snowy still works for me) - so if you have a Pebble, do it now! A Rebble account is free, but dictation & weather services will be $3/month or $33/year.

I'll always have mixed feelings about Pebble. Their hardware was great (I still wear my Pebble Time Steel every day) and their developer support was awesome, but their attitude towards customer privacy was awful (the privacy policy basically said, in a very sneaky weaselly way, that they would record anything they wanted off your phone, store it for as long as they wanted, and use it for whatever they wanted, including selling it to third parties if they wanted.) I ended up never using the official app for this reason and it definitely reduced the usefulness of the watch as well as leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

This is also yet another illustration of how vulnerable "IoT" / "cloud"-based products are to changes in the market. The producing company crashes or gets bought out and your toy suddenly doesn't work any more.

Still, it's awesome to see the platform being opened up. It looks like at least some of the original engineering team are there, maybe there's a future for the platform after all.

Heh, that's almost exactly the privacy policy for my hobby website.

The hardware is great and they got the concept of a smartwatch just right (something Fitbit is struggling with even with their latest offering), but I disliked the software in a bunch of ways ("Hey, how can I access the microphone stream? What, I can only get the transcription?", "Okay, I'm fed up enough with X to go into the OS code and change it, where's the repo? What, it's closed?!)". Plus all of their support ("Hey, where can I get a replacement glass cover and battery? What, you don't sell parts?").

Infuriating for a product that is called a "geek watch" at every chance.

It's amazing that Rebble is tackling the software part. Ideally I would like to see a smartwatch OS that can run the same apps on different hardware.

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that the original team had the right idea but then "smartwatch is the new iphone" fever kicked in. They could have settled for being a $10 million company selling a practical, hackable smartwatch, and they'd still be around today. Instead they tried to compete with Apple Watch and Android Wear and their unlimited budgets, and in doing so they forgot what made them special: Open platform, long battery life, reasonable prices.

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