Hacker News Reader

Just basing things off of Android won't get you the "measured in days to weeks" battery life people appreciated about the Pebble, and building your own watch OS from scratch optimized for battery life but still supporting BLE connection to a phone sounds like a great way to spend several years.

As per blog post:

"PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build..."

It's really really difficult to make a full smartwatch OS that's nice to use. The closest OSS one I've seen (and also worked on) is InfiniTime for PineTime, it's great but it still needs tons of work. Now imagine you have an ecosyste people have built for years. It's such a massive difference.