I have a Pebble Time Steel that I have been using with different phones for the last ten years, enjoying the possibility that Pebble allows the watch to have two phone connections stored. So depending on whether I have my work phone or my private phone with me, the watch will always connect to the phone nearby.
This still worked with one of the first updates of the Pebble app last year, but since a few months ago, the watch won’t connect to the Pebble app anymore, the App is stuck in a constant switch between connecting… negotiating…
I managed to get this resolved on one phone by completely resetting the watch and app and then connecting, as the app now tells you “unpair any other phones before connecting”. Then, trying to connect the second phone, I get the bluetooth connection (as per phone settings), but the Pebble app stays on “negotiating”, and never successfully connects to the watch.
Can Pebble watches now only be paired to one phone? That would be a huge step back for me, and I would even move back to the old app (which probably won’t work with my new Pebble once it arrives).
lol I re-read the entire message to find it but not the title…
Basically, you cannot have multiple phones paired to the same watch over BLE because that was never implemented in watch firmware. Those watches never used BLE on android previously, which is why it used to work (multiple BT classic pairings do work).
We disabled adding multiple pairings on the watch itself on the new watches (to prevent it being very annoying and randomly working sometimes), but on old watches like Time Steel, you might find that it works if you enable BT classic mode in settings.
FYI “it used to work but now it doesn’t” is entirely random - the firmware picks a paired phone and only tries to connect to that one, over BLE.
Oh no, so the new watches won’t be able to pair with more than one phone anymore? That’s a real bummer, as this was such an advantage of Pebble over other smartwatches. There are so many people who have more than one phone…
Enabling classic mode did not help, unfortunately, it’s still stuck in negotiating. So i got out an even older phone that still had the old Pebble App v4.4.2 installed, and the watch connected immediately. So even with “classic mode” enabled, the new App does not behave like the old one with regards to BT connections.
The BT classic mode in the new app still relies on BLE to provide an initial connection (it’s complicated - but we’re going to make it a pure BT classic connection at some point, at which point it’s more likely to work for you - why I said it might work).
I’ll be honest, for the new watches (which don’t support BT classic) it would take some re-architecting how BLE works with Pebbles to make it work reliably with multiple pairings, and we just haven’t had enough people ask us about that for it to make sense putting in that effort.
People just don’t know what they are missing
Good to hear, though, that the old watch will eventually work with multiple phones again once the pure BT classic connection is in place. But it won’t help me much, as my Time Steel is almost physically EOL, with me having had to glue the display again and there being some blind spots. Which is why I was desperately waiting for the new one.
