I was an original Kickstarter backer for the first Pebble e-ink watch. I’ve had many smart wrist devices (mostly Fitbit series) but never dove into the Apple Watch because I don’t want to charge it every day. The Pebble watch solved that, only needing a charge roughly once every two weeks.
The app ecosystem was extremely friendly to step into. While watchfaces were programmed in C, the PebbleJS SDK allowed you to write JavaScript that runs on the mobile phone and leverage JavaScript APIs to generate menus and click handlers to be displayed on the watch. A clever solution that makes the creation of apps and the leveraging of phone APIs super easy and fun.
After Pebble was bought by Fitbit and later merged with Google, the original founder (Success and Failure at Pebble) revived the platform and re-issued the Pebble watches, using the same source as before and leveraging all the original apps and watchfaces as well.
This time around, Agentic Engineering is fully embraced in the SDKs and watchfaces. It’s really cool that the boilerplate project for a watchface comes packaged with Claude skills and agent files, so you can start prompting on contents right away, and the skills cover the SDK / device / testing specifics. Even the process of publishing to the store is performed in the CLI and described to agents with a skill file.
The latest addition to the series of products is the Pebble Index 01,