Merge pull request pebble-dev#63 from pebble-dev/posts/shiny-future

Add Shiny Future post

Author: ishotjr

_posts/2019-07-29-the-shiny-rebble-future.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "The shiny Rebble future: one year after the Pebble server shutdown"
+date:   2019-07-29 18:00:00
+# categories: community
+---
+
+Hi out there, Rebble world!  [Joshua](https://joshuawise.com) on the
+microphone here for a bit.  It's been a year since the Pebble servers have
+shut down, and I'm still wearing my beloved Pebble 2 on my wrist every day;
+as far as I can tell, it's *still* the case that nothing else out there
+compares to these things.  As the buttons start to wear out on this one,
+though, I'm starting to ask some of the same questions that I hear echoed
+out in the Pebble world: what does the future of Rebble and of
+Pebble-like things look like?  Well, I'm an optimist on that -- and I wanted
+to fill you all in on some of the reasons why.  I'll catch you after the
+fold.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+Lingering in the back of my head have been three things: money, movement,
+and hardware.  Without money, the Rebble web services can't run; without
+forward movement, we fade quietly into the sunset; and without hardware,
+there's nothing to put on our wrists!  On all three of those, I have pretty
+darn good news in the short term, and I have ideas for the long run, too.
+I'm going to get into each of those in a moment, but before I do, I want to
+give you the same proviso [that Katharine did last
+year](http://rebble.io/2018/02/15/rebble-web-services.html): I can't guarantee the future, but I'm going
+to give you my best guess.  Let's start!
+
+## Money
+
+I think this is the biggest question on everyone's mind after we watched the
+downfall of our beloved Pebble Technology Corporation: how can we build a
+_sustainable_ way to keep our watches ticking?  After all, web hosting can
+be pretty expensive for a cloud application like Rebble, and we're not even
+making any revenue by selling watches.  The solution that we came up with
+was to have a two-tier model: everybody gets access to the basic services
+for Pebble for free -- firmware updates, the app store, account management,
+and such, but the things that cost us money -- dictation and weather -- we'd
+charge a small amount of money for, and if we got the math right, the paid
+users would subsidize the free users.
+
+So the question is: how well did that work out?  I'm happy to say that it
+seems to be working pretty well.  We have around 7,000 paid users, which
+comes out to about an annual run rate of around $190,000.  This means that we're
+doing a fair bit better than breaking even for now: even though we're not
+drowning in cash, Rebble is definitely managing to pay its own rent from
+Amazon.  This is heartwarming news, and I hope that it makes everyone feel
+better about the sustainability of Rebble itself, and also about Rebble's
+model for running services.
+
+On that front, I wanted to thank all of you who are Rebble subscribers:
+without you, it wouldn't be possible to keep this service running, and you
+all are amazing proof that people will pay to sustain technology that they
+want to have more of in their life. :heart_eyes:  [Maciej Ceglowski](http://idlewords.com/),
+proprietor of a small bookmarking service called [Pinboard](https://pinboard.in), wrote [a
+good piece a few years ago](https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/) about the importance of small paid services, and
+how they help build business models that center their users as a priority,
+instead of business models that center investors or surveillance systems as
+priorities; I have looked to that as inspiration, and I'm glad that we can follow in those footsteps.  It's a joy to serve you all!
+
+I suppose this would be the right time, also, to invite those of you who
+haven't joined us as subscribers to come on board!  I think that $3/month (or
+$33/year, if you subscribe for a year at a time) is a great value for being
+able to dictate messages while I'm out on my bike, and for knowing at a
+glance when the sun is going to close me out without having to pull out my
+phone -- and, of course, as I noted above, subscriptions go towards keeping
+Rebble sustainable.  So it's never too late to [join the
+Rebble-lution](https://auth.rebble.io/account/])!
+
+## Movement
+
+One worry, of course, is that if Rebble is standing still, we start to look
+pretty dead.  After all, we'd been pretty quiet for about a year after the
+initial Rebble Web Services launch.  Well, I assure you that we're not dead!
+Some of you with eagle eyes :eyes: have been watching commits to the Rebble
+repositories, and have noticed that the pace of development has picked up
+some over the past few months, culminating with the most recent [launch of
+Timeline](http://rebble.io/2019/07/24/its-timeline-time.html).  You might be asking: what lead to this sudden surge in motion?
+And will the development continue?
+
+Well, in May, [Katharine](https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry), [Ish Ot
+Jr.](https://twitter.com/IShJR), and [I](https://joshuawise.com) got
+together in a Hangout, and we spent some time thinking about the future of
+Rebble.  We decided that we had a little bit of money left to spare, and
+that we wanted to reinvest it in the development of Rebble, and so we'd pay
+someone to do a little engineering work.  Well, precisely, we'd pay, well --
+me!  About a year ago, I left my previous day job to [do some software and
+hardware consulting](https://accelerated.tech), and as a result of that, it
+suddenly became possible for me to dedicate time in small quantities, rather
+than as "everything or nothing".  For the past few months, I've been doing
+about six hours of paid work a week or so on Rebble (and maybe another five
+or six during the evenings and on the weekends!) to knock off some features
+that we've been hoping to build.
+
+I've been doing a bunch of work behind the scenes on building development
+tools and administrative features so that we can help you out with billing
+problems, but Timeline was the first major fruit of that work that was
+visible to you, our beloved users.  I don't think Timeline will be the end,
+either: on my to-do list is to start building out the app store developer
+portal, and even some work on longer-term ideas for keeping the Pebble
+ecosystem alive.  Of course, all of the work that I'm doing is and always
+will be open-source, just like the rest of Rebble (it's even written into
+the contract!).
+
+I'm doing this all on the back of the amazing work that Katharine did to get
+Rebble Web Services off the ground.  She basically put this whole thing
+together single-handedly, and I owe her incredible thanks for such a strong
+foundation to keep building on top of.  If you haven't watched her talk from
+[!!Con West 2019](http://bangbangcon.com/west), it's a great story about how
+we got here, told expertly in 10 minutes -- [go watch it; you won't regret
+it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qrfjbb5jKw)!
+
+A year ago, Ish Ot Jr. wrote and said that we're just getting started, and
+he was right.  It feels to me like we have a path forward to keep building
+Rebble into the future: we took a breather after we launched, but we're back
+at it, and now we're geared up to -- as Pebble liked to say -- keep making
+awesome happen! :rocket:
+
+## Hardware
+
+The last piece of the puzzle, I claim, is hardware.  I'm not the only one
+with holes bursting in the buttons of his Pebble 2.  Pebble Technology
+Corporation isn't making any more of the things, so in theory, our userbase
+is only shrinking from here, and that's not a good place to be.  How can we
+keep more Pebbles running for longer, and is there ever a possibility of
+there being more?
+
+### Pebble life support: you can save your Pebble now!
+
+I am a die-hard believer in my Pebble 2, but as we all know, these things
+have a serious design defect: [the silicone buttons on the side fall apart
+after about a year](https://m.imgur.com/a/98Z7A).  There have been a handful of makeshift solutions out
+there, but I never found the Sugru approach to be great.  Fortunately, the
+quality of 3D printing has gotten quite good in recent years -- and even
+more fortunately, two wonderful Pebblers have been experimenting with
+hardware to rebuild Pebbles stronger, and, frankly, I think even
+better-looking.  Tation and Astosia have [a Shapeways store](https://www.shapeways.com/shops/astosia?section=pebble&sort=) with all manner
+of exciting fixes for your Pebble 2, including entirely new cases that use
+the original "OG" Pebble buttons; they also have [Imgur albums](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/cvdagKI) [with the guts](https://m.imgur.com/a/nGeXEq0) of how to dissasemble and reassemble the devices.  They're also experimenting with
+replacement 3D printed rubber buttons that you can glue right on.  So if
+your Pebble 2 is falling apart, don't despair: there are fixes that you can
+make today to bring it back to life!  There are also some [models available](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3464868) [on Thingiverse](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2599551), for those inspired to print their own.
+
+The batteries in these things also don't last forever, we've found.
+Luckily, it seems like you can get anything in China if you know where to
+look -- people have had success with batteries from Aliexpress for the
+original Pebbles, for Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel, and for Pebble 2.
+If you're handy doing a little soldering, Pebble batteries are not too
+tricky to replace, and you can get years more of reliable service from your
+beloved Pebble.
+
+### Pebble life support going forward
+
+Here's the bit where I start to speculate a little bit.  I've heard
+[rumblings of the GadgetWraps guys making some side buttons for Pebble 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/chqa9v/pebble_2_side_buttons_should_we_makesell_these/) with
+their beautiful silicone molding process.  If they do, it could be possible
+to get the same lovely smooth feeling buttons that you were used to, without
+any major surgery at all.  If that sounds like something you'd like, you
+might want to shoot them some mail telling them that you'd be interested!
+
+I've also been talking a little bit with a low-volume injection molding
+company.  I don't want to say too much about that, since I don't know where
+it will end up, but it's definitely possible that in the not-so-distant
+future, we could have new cases for Pebbles in all manner of interesting
+shapes designs, and materials.  The logistics of selling them are very scary
+to me, but if there's interest, Astosia, Tation, and I are interested in
+making it happen!
+
+### The post-Pebble problem
+
+Of course, this is all well and good, but how can we bring new Rebblers into the
+fold?  In some ideal universe, it would be nice to sell new hardware,
+without all of the pain of trying to limp along something that we didn't
+design.  What if we could improve on Pebble with new features?  After all,
+Bluetooth microcontrollers have come a long way in the last few years in
+terms of power consumption...
+
+It sounds like a pipe dream, but it's not entirely.  Over the Christmas
+break last year, I [designed an nRF52840-powered microcontroller board](https://github.com/jwise/aWatch2-hw) that,
+hopefully, could be shrunk down into the form factor of a watch.  A month or
+two later, I had a circuit board that I called "Asterix" that I had
+Bluetooth and a display up and running on ...  and a month after that, I
+managed to bring RebbleOS up on that, along with my Pebble app "Dali Clock".
+For the first time in history, I think, I had an application that was built
+using only Pebble tools running on non-Pebble Technology Corp hardware!
+
+I don't want to get your hopes up too much.  There's a lot of work to do.
+Barry -- who some of you on Discord may know as
+[ginge](https://github.com/ginge) -- did an *amazing* job laying the
+groundwork for RebbleOS, but as everybody who's come and asked about it
+knows, we still have a long way to go on the software front.  The hardware
+that I have is about four times too big; I think it's definitely possible to
+shrink it, but it'll require a good amount of effort to do.  And the
+question of manufacturing it looms huge in my mind, and I don't know where
+to even start with that.
+
+But it feels possible, in a way that it didn't a year ago.  I'm hoping that
+I can put some time towards that once I get Timeline settled in and under
+control.  I don't know anything about manufacturing, and distributing and
+selling them scares the dickens out of me even if I manage to make more than
+one of them.  So, hey, if you know about these things and want to take
+charge of a piece of it -- come in and help out!  I'd be happy to work with
+you!
+
+On that front, I'll leave you with an [exciting little video of Asterix
+booting into RebbleOS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2VBVRp234).  It's
+way less complete than it looks: it's incredibly unstable, and it doesn't
+even know how to talk to the Pebble app yet.  There's so much I don't know,
+and I don't even know how to estimate how much is behind it.  But it's hard
+not to look at it and grin.  What is the purpose of the future, if not to
+give us something to aspire to?
+
+## Conclusions
+
+Rebble is alive and well.  I touched on three pieces: money, progress, and
+hardware.  These three things all feed into each other: money keeps us
+alive, and helps us make progress; progress keeps us alive, and helps us
+make hardware; and keeping hardware alive keeps us alive, and lets
+Rebble keep making money.  In the short term, Rebble is healthy on all three
+of these fronts.  There's a plausible idea for how we could remain healthy
+going forward, too!  It's going to take work, and it's going to take the
+continued support of you, our amazing community, but it's not impossible.
+
+On a personal note, it feels very rewarding to get to serve yinz Rebblers.
+Pebble built a passionate group of users.  I'm excited.
+
+Ok, that seems like about it for today.  Thanks for staying with us so far,
+and I'm looking forward to coming with you all into the Shiny Rebble Future
+-- keep your Pebbles on your wrists!