I'm new to Pebble and have been excited about joining the community; I have a Pebble Time 2 on preorder. I will certainly cancel the pre-order unless Rebble affirmatively says they are satisfied with the arrangement.
Indeed, it bodes rather poorly for the sustainability of Core if they're already behaving like owning everything is critical to satisfying some hypergrowth checkbox. I kind of thought the whole point of the new organization was not to be another startup and to rather to be more like a scaled cottage industry player, making a niche product for nerds and selling it directly to them for a reasonable upfront profit margin rather than depending on collecting rent from a closed app ecosystem to pay the bills.