upebble is a new application currently being developed by the community that allows users of Ubuntu Touch to connect to their Pebble watches.
Ubuntu Touch is a new operating system, and that means that developers are not working overtime to enable support for it. Since Pebble has been such a success, it’s a real shame that there isn’t any kind of official support for the Ubuntu Touch platform.
This meant that the developers from the Ubuntu Community had to take care of the problem themselves, and they have managed to get them connected. When the project was started a month ago, only call notifications worked, but things have changed in the meantime, and now a lot more is available, including call notifications, message notifications, telegram notifications, calendar notifications, call control, calendar notifications, and Evernote task notifications. More is coming.
Pebble support on Ubuntu
Besides the fact that it works, this also shows a really interesting aspect of the development process. From the looks of it, developers were capable of some reverse engineering, showing just how flexible the Ubuntu platform really is.
Ubuntu user Wayne Ward wrote a nice and simple tutorial on how to get the Pebble to work on the Ubuntu Touch platform, and it’s not really all that difficult. It’s quite likely that things will get much simpler in the near future.
Ubuntu for phones is already stable, and this kind of involvement from the community is actually something normal. Many of the core components of Ubuntu Touch are not built by the team, but by the community.
The Pebble Smartwatch was released all the way back in 2013, and it has sold more than a million units. The project started as a crowdfunding process, which contributed to its fame. The upebble project is still in the Alpha stages, so expect to hear more from it soon.
Via Softpedia