Long story short, fitbit bought pebble when pebble grew too fast and was not maintainable (to be fair, despite the mistakes made they were open about it and were extremely fair to customers), then google swoop in and bought fitbit, but not to do anything good or bad with it (i guess just to absorb a competitor or take users’ data). The community kept the pebbles running, a tough job but worth it. Eventually out of whatever goodness or lack of interest or whatever reason google decided to open source all the pebble stuff to allow the community to continue building and supporting the devices.

Eric migikowski, founder of pebble, came back to release new watches building on top of all the community work to maintain old pebbles alive. This time he has corrected their path. They are more lean and careful with growth and they are basically building everything as open source, in a way as a way to give back to the community as it was their effort that made the come back possible. But also in an effort to future proof all the devices and avoid the same issues from happening again.

Personally I love the brand and the products. It really shows that the founder, the devs, the community… they are all in this because they want those devices for themselves, not just to sell a product. That’s the situation to the best of my knowledge, everything is open now and the devices are great.

I found this discussion that has some reasoning from the creator as well as workarounds by users.

Yes, it works on microG.