The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2025
Core Devices revives Pebble: 10,000 e-paper watches, 30-day battery, no investors
When Google open-sourced PebbleOS, founder Eric Migicovsky built a lean, self-funded company to sell a 10,000-unit run of revival e-paper watches.
Core Devices
What it had to solve
Pebble defined the early smartwatch, but its 2016 sale to Fitbit killed the company and cancelled the Pebble Time 2 before it shipped. When Google — which bought Fitbit in 2021 — released most of PebbleOS's source code in January 2025 to help the community keep old watches alive, founder Eric Migicovsky saw a second chance at the hardware.
How it works
Pebble's 2012 Kickstarter created the modern smartwatch, but the small company was sold to Fitbit in 2016 and shut down; the Pebble Time 2 announced that year never reached customers. What survived was the community: volunteers kept old Pebbles working long after the company died, waiting on software they could not fully fix.
In January 2025 Google open-sourced most of PebbleOS, and Migicovsky announced he would build a new Pebble-like watch on top of it — deliberately small this time. His new company, Core Devices, launched two models in March: the $149 Core 2 Duo, a 10,000-unit run of e-paper watches with physical buttons and a 30-day battery, and the long-lost Core Time 2 with a colour e-paper screen. Specs were unfashionable on purpose: fans wanted the always-on e-paper, buttons and battery that made Pebble special.
The run sold direct without retail or investors, and the trademark came back in July, making the watches officially Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2*. By November 2025 the whole software stack — watch OS, mobile apps, SDK and app-store feeds — was open source, and the Duo's design files were on GitHub, so anyone could build on or repair the hardware. As Migicovsky put it, as long as the company stays profitable it will keep making watches; if it disappears, the watches do not have to.
Why it lands
- Open source removed the single point of failure that killed Pebble in 2016 — with the OS in the community's hands, the hardware could come back.
- The product bet was restraint: e-paper, buttons and a 30-day battery went against the big-bright-screen trend and matched exactly what the remaining fan base wanted.
- Small and self-funded was the model: no investor pressure to scale, production limited to 10,000 units first, sustainability instead of growth at any cost.
- Compatibility made the revival instant: existing Pebble apps and watchfaces ran unchanged, and reusing 2016 display panels kept the first run cheap to build.
What it did
Pre-orders opened in March 2025 and the run sold to the fans it was built for; after Core Devices recovered the Pebble trademark in July, the watches were renamed Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2*. The Duo began shipping in late summer, and by November 2025 Core Devices had made the watch software 100% open source, published the Duo's electrical and mechanical schematics, and decentralised the app store — so the ecosystem can outlive the company.
What you can take
A dead product can return when its ecosystem outlived it: make the software open, keep the company small enough to survive on niche demand, and build hardware people can repair.
Since then
Core Devices shipped the Pebble 2 Duo through late 2025 and pushed the Pebble Time 2 into production for early 2026, while publishing the schematics, source code and app-store infrastructure that make the ecosystem independent of any one company. Media coverage treated the revival as the reference case for open-source hardware longevity, though a dispute with the Rebble community over app data showed the tensions in who owns a revived brand.
Sources
- New Pebble smartwatch is coming as Google opens source code
- Pebble smartwatches are back as 'Core,' starting at $149 with 30-day battery life
- Pebble Watch Software Is Now 100% Open Source + Tick Talk #4 - PT2 Demos!
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