The Pebble Watch once caused quite a stir compared to its name when the first smartwatch was launched in 2013.
There was a huge Kickstarter campaign, the launch was highly anticipated and came to market later. In the end it had a loyal fan base that devoured the original with plastic and E Ink screen. A year later the Pebble Steel also came out with three color screen.
I was one of the owners and fans of Pebble Steel, getting the stainless steel wearable just after my 50th birthday. Pebble wasn’t the only smartwatch maker at the time, but it had the biggest mindshare. Reviews and hands-ons were almost always positive, which was a bit shocking considering how little the first Pebble did. Instead of a collection of apps, it had custom watch faces and a black and white screen.
Yet it still felt like a traditional watch upgrade, with access to email, notifications, and phone calls. It was power-hungry—it lasted a full week on a single charge—and virtually waterproof.
What it lacked in fashion it made up for in its $149 price tag and cute looks. The style matched the cute name. My $249 Pebble Steel was a little different. Instead of plastic, I got a steel body, a Gorilla Glass screen cover, and a three-tone display. Apps like Glance and Evernote were starting to arrive.
I remember wearing the Pebble Steel almost every day. It was the first smartwatch that lured me away from my extensive analog watch collection.
Pebble eventually released a color Pebble Time, but it arrived just as Apple launched the original Apple Watch, a wearable that traded days of battery life for a color touchscreen and, among other things, extensive health and fitness tracking capabilities. It did pretty much everything the Pebble Watch could do, but came much closer to a wearable smartphone than a simple watch.
A year later, Pebble ceased to exist. That’s just four short years for the company and just two years in the lifespan of my beloved Pebble Steel, barely enough time to get its first scratch on the dial.
Within a few years, all software support would cease. I can’t remember it falling out of favor so quickly. Pebble Watch went from tech industry darling to wearable has-been in record time. But what about all those millions of Pebble Watches and Pebble Steels sold?
My Pebble Steel still sits next to my favorite everyday watch collection. Since I resurrected my vintage Casio LCD, I wear all my old watches, but still occasionally wear the best smartwatch (that would be the Apple Watch).
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All these years later, I wondered if I would be able to wear my old Pebble Steel again. Like I said, it’s in perfect condition. But first I had to find the MagSafe-style charger. I never throw anything away, but it still took me a day to find that proprietary charging cable, but that turned out to be the least of my problems.
The Pebble Steel booted up as if nothing had happened and I almost felt sorry for my watch. I didn’t know how to say that the world had changed and it was no longer relevant.
On the plus side, the watch accepted a full charge and showed the date and time. Scratch that. Pebble Steel shows a date and time. It’s not the right date and time; the watch thinks it’s January, and every time I turn it on, it’s midnight. Well, it’s midnight somewhere, but not here, not now.
I would need a working smartphone connection to get my Pebble to show the correct time. That would be easy if it was 2014, but it’s a challenge in 2024.
Actually, getting a Bluetooth connection between my ten-year-old Pebble Steel and my not-yet-year-old iPhone 15 Pro Max was easy. The phone saw that the watch was ready to pair, and I got a message on the watch, and my work was done. That connection, however, proved to be useless. It didn’t change the time or date, and without a Pebble app on the phone—which was removed from the App Store years ago—I was at a loss.
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After Pebble went bankrupt, the IP was sold to Fitbit, which was then acquired by Google. What those companies did with Pebble’s technology is anyone’s guess. However, a group of dedicated Pebble fans launched Rebble in 2016 to “preserve and improve Pebble’s functionality.”
When I posted pictures of my Pebble Steel on social media, most people pointed to Rebble as the solution to breathe new life into the ailing smartwatch.
Rebble has software that you can sideload onto an iPhone if you’re willing to follow detailed instructions that sometimes feel like they could break your watch, your iPhone, or both. They also have similar tools for Android.
However, neither solution is still functional or practical. On the Android side, the APK is not compatible with the latest version of Android. On the iOS side, the situation is perhaps even worse. Most browsers do not trust the Sideloady app that Rebble tells you to use, and even if I could get all of the nearly twelve steps working, I would have to redo a third of them weekly just to keep the Pebble Steel functional.
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I’m beginning to realize that the Pebble Steel is nothing more than an artifact, a beautiful museum piece that reflects the first signs of truly useful smartwatches—unless someone builds an App Store app that can work with this old hardware.
It’s a shame I can’t revive it, and perhaps even worse that something so new and still beautiful is headed to a landfill or recycling plant. I’m not the only one giving up on Pebble. Rebble keeps some statistics on its current user base, and the rough estimate is 24,530 active users. According to Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky, Pebble has sold 2 million Pebble watches in five years. That means most of them go unused or, more likely, are thrown away.
I don’t blame Pebble. The company tried, but couldn’t compete with the entry of the world’s most important technology company into the market; Migicovsky noted in his Medium post, “I shouldn’t have aggressively grown the company without a stronger plan.”
That FitBit and later Google saw no path forward for the Pebble brand and hardware is less forgivable, but also understandable. Who wants to reverse-engineer someone else’s wearable tech when the market is moving so quickly, and anything they could build with it would likely be years behind the next Pixel Watch or Apple Watch?
Goodbye Pebble Steel and thank you for paving the way for practical wearable technology.