Your Pebble watch should work for at least another year

Fitbit acquired Pebble and essentially shut the company down in the process – at least in terms of making and selling Pebble hardware, but if you already have a Pebble watch the software should keep working for a while yet.

In a blog post, Jon Barlow, a developer at Pebble, has revealed that Fitbit is working to keep Pebble software and services running through 2017, and that for now the apps, app store, SDK, Timeline APIs, firmware availability and developer portal will all remain functional.

Reading between the lines it sounds like after 2017 some services may be shut down, but others will continue to work, and to achieve that the company is planning to update its mobile apps, loosening their dependency on cloud services so that they’ll continue to function even once those cloud services are discontinued.

This update will allow Pebble Health to continue working as normal, because health data isn’t dependent on the cloud and will instead feed directly into the Pebble mobile app, along with Google Fit and Apple HealthKit.

Sooner or later some features will be disabled

For features dependent on third-party services – such as messaging, weather and dictation - the future is less clear, with the company apparently evaluating if and for how long these functions can continue.

But even if Pebble and Fitbit stop supporting them there may be hope, as the blog notes that developers in the Pebble community are already teaming up to help keep the Pebble watch experience alive.

If you’re a developer you can join them, but even if you’re not you can still help, by engaging with Fitbit to demonstrate that Pebble is still important to you.

TOPICS

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.

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