In 2023, when I realized small phones were truly dead, I decided I couldn’t wait for the Small Android Phone Project to revive them. That project, from the founder of the Pebble smartwatch, just wasn’t far enough along. Unfortunately, things aren’t any better in 2025 for small phone lovers — now that founder Eric Migicovsky is bringing back the Pebble smartwatch (yay!), he tells me he’s only “tangentially” working on small phones, and that they’re no longer “the top priority.”

“I really do hope someone else makes one so I don’t have to 😂,” writes Migicovsky.

I’m now one of a contingent of Samsung Galaxy Z Flip owners who is seriously considering trading in my Flip for a Galaxy S25. It’s not small, but it’s the closest thing we’ve got and my Flip’s battery doesn’t remotely last until bedtime anymore. I ask Migicovsky whether I can safely upgrade without feeling I might miss out on a possible Small Android Phone by, say, mid-2026. He says I can, without commenting on my proposed timeline.

At one point the phone project was targeting a 2024 release date and had gotten as far as creating an entire brand, Beep, to market it with, according to the portfolio of Small Android Phone Project industrial designer Alex De Stasio. He’d even dreamt up a billboard:

I’m still pretty excited for Migicovsky’s new project to revive the Pebble smartwatch — I loved my Pebble Time Steel and even owned two of them for a bit. You shouldn’t get your expectations up too high for that project, either, though: Migicovsky told the Android Faithful podcast that “this will not be a watch for everyone,” and expanded on that in a February 6th blog post:

Please don’t get your hopes up that the new watch will have X/Y/Z new feature. It’s going to be a Pebble and almost exactly as you remember it, except now with open source software that can you can modify and improve yourself. More hardware details will be shared in the future.

For the uninitiated, the original Pebbles were low-power devices whose best features were dead simplicity and battery life — no touchscreen, no digital crown, just a few buttons to help you read notifications and run a catalog of charming basic apps. That’s fine with me as long as the buttons are good!

A few other things he’s confirmed about the new Pebble so far:

• It will be new hardware, not an existing watch
• It’s targeting this specific chip as processor, which is marketed primarily as a Bluetooth SoC!
• You’ll be able to load your own firmware if you want to develop your own features

He told Android Faithful there are two software features he’d like to add. His “big thing” is to someday have a chat client, one that could address a limitation of early Pebbles by letting you see a whole conversation history on your wrist. The other is a basic AI handoff: “Pebble has a microphone, it has a screen… why can’t you talk to ChatGPT?”

Migicovsky should be in Shenzhen this week to meet with suppliers and factories for the new smartwatch.