From Wear to Pebble

Initially, when wearables debuted, I was dubious. I had little doubt that some people would find them to be useful, but I did not expect that I would be among them.

Then, around late 2020, my team at MIRROR needed to add Android Wear/Wear OS support to our fitness mirror. So, I bought a few Wear devices for testing. I quickly determined that Wear 2 devices were less than completely useful, with CPUs that reminded me of Android phones from 2009 coupled with an OS that needed more than that. But, the Samsung Watch with Wear OS 3 was nice, and I took to it as a “daily driver” wearable.

Over the years, I moved from that Samsung to a Mobvoi TicWatch, then later to a Pixel Watch 3. Increasingly, I found Wear OS to be annoying, but I stuck with it. More recently, after a botched attempt to move my daily driver phone to GrapheneOS, I lost a lot of watch functionality, as I could never get it re-connected fully to my pre-GrapheneOS phone. 🤷🏻

When rePebble appeared on the scene last year, I took notice. I had never owned a Pebble, but I remembered their Kickstarter era. Plus, the TicWatch used an eInk/e-paper screen for its always-on experience (dual-layered with a classic touchscreen), and I appreciated the low power draw.

So, I took the plunge and bought a Pebble Time 2. A few weeks later, my Pixel Watch 3 is up for sale on eBay.

Is Pebble OS as powerful as Wear OS? No. Is the Time 2 as powerful as the Pixel Watch 3? Ha ha ha ha ha ha… no. But I don’t really need that kind of power, which mostly seemed to be there to make for snazzy animations, even if the underlying apps were less than completely stable. 🧐

What I wanted was something that was less-Googly, required fewer charges, had an open source foundation, and had a developer ecosystem. The Pebble qualifies on all those fronts.

I’ll be writing some Pebble apps and contributing to others. I am not going to turn this into a Pebble blog 😅, but I’ll mention my Pebble work from time to time.

After nearly 20 years of freelance developer advocacy for Android, between Pebble and my Kotlin Multiplatform projects, it’s kinda nice to be thinking about different platforms for some stuff.