They sent an email a few minutes after I posted, saying that their fulfillment centre dropped the ball and they're escalating internally. I guess complaining on HN worked.
Hope they can figure out the dispute with Rebble. Maybe they end up hosting apps on a package manager and create some binding contract?
Rebble's "one red line" is "there has to be a future for Rebble in there." They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out. There's also emphasis on "our work," "we built this," "we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." They feel Eric isn't acknowledging where his infrastructure came from.
Core Devices' thing is explicitly stating concern about relying on a third party (Rebble) for "critical services" his customers depend on. If "Rebble leadership changes their mind," they can't guarantee customer experience. They wants the app store archive to be "freely available" and "not controlled by one organization." They don't want to need "permission from Rebble" before building features (like free weather, voice-to-text) that might compete with Rebble's paid services. The fundamental fear seems to be business risk: being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Neither side seems to trust the other's long-term intentions, creating an impasse where both feel existentially threatened by the other's preferred arrangement.
My take: I bought a watch in 2014. After the pebble 2 duo black fiasco (they ran out of stock, offered a white instead which I accepted 2 weeks ago, never shipped, and have ghosted my emails asking for shipping timelines.) I had high hopes, but given the messy interaction with the OSS world I'm considering cancelling my order for the duo and time two.
From my experience working on SaaS, and improving ops at large organizations, I've seen that "on-call culture" often exists inversely proportional to incentive alignment.
When engineers bear the full financial consequences of 3AM pages, they're more likely to make systems more resilient by adding graceful failure modes. When incident response becomes an organizational checkbox divorced from financial outcomes and planning, you get perpetual firefighting.
The most successful teams I've seen treat on-call like a leading indicator - every incident represents unpriced technical debt that should be systematically eliminated. Each alert becomes an investment opportunity rather than a burden to be rotated.
Big companies aren't missing the resources to fix this; they just don't have the aligned incentive structures that make fixing it rational for individuals involved.
The most rational thing to do as an individual on a bad rotation: quit or transfer.
Hope they can figure out the dispute with Rebble. Maybe they end up hosting apps on a package manager and create some binding contract?