alt Hacker NewsThere's two big factors that make software compatibility very important for this product specifically.
1. His team is positively tiny compared to what Pebble used to have, and the less software work that's needed, the better.
2. All of the apps and watchfaces people wrote for the original Pebbles were distributed as compiled ARM binaries, so if you picked an MCU with an entirely different instruction set, you'd lose backwards compatibility. ESP32 would fall into that category, for example (not that it would have been a good choice anyway).
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I mean, these applications are by necessity very tiny. They must fit in a very small memory. Hence, I seriously question that it would take a lot of work to rewrite the software for a different architecture. You can reuse the entire graphical design (which is probably a large chunk of the work because designing for small screens is not easy).
There are solution for question 2. You can either add a compatibility layer to the software stack(something like Java VM), or people can build their app against your codebase, and your watch will dynamically load it and run(like how linux run their app). In Zephyr they have LLEXT for that.