Rebuilding Pebble: What a Difference a Decade Makes
summary
Rebuilds the Pebble companion apps from scratch with a six‑person company and two mobile engineers using Kotlin Multiplatform, Compose Multiplatform and coroutines, replacing ~100k Java + ~130k Objective‑C lines with ~37k Kotlin (28k common); core libraries: Room, Ktor, Cable for BLE, KSP codegen for blob DBs. Alpha ships in July and production apps and watches ship weeks later; most features work but Bluetooth still flaky and iOS has platform limits; libpebble3 is open source.
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chapters (35)
- 0:00Rebuilding Pebble intro
- 3:13What is Pebble smartwatch
- 5:05Pebble revival and open source
- 7:10Mobile apps for new Pebble
- 10:28Pebble app features needed
- 11:12Original Pebble team process
- 12:44Rebuilding challenges tiny team
- 13:48Android 2014 vs 2025
- 15:57Modern Android tools libraries
- 16:18iOS limitations Apple
- 18:29Kotlin Multiplatform choice
- 20:15Open source Pebble community
- 21:20Kotlin Multiplatform concerns
- 22:04Bluetooth complexity Android
- 24:10Bluetooth with coroutines
- 25:38Notifications with coroutines
- 27:26Watch DB Room KSP
- 28:48Sync logic modern tools
- 30:16UI with Jetpack Compose
- 32:07Code reduction results
- 33:16Common vs platform code
- 34:21Platform capability handling
- 35:46UI design compromises
- 36:49Debugging Compose performance
- 37:31App stability crash reduction
- 38:15Debugging JavaScript Core iOS
- 38:57AI for code assistance
- 40:00New Android APIs
- 41:30Android SDK challenges
- 42:14Bluetooth reliability changes
- 42:37Libble 3 open source
- 43:18Current status production
- 44:45Compromises future plans
- 45:28Why modern Android better
- 46:32Closing Q&A
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