Well, the sad news was announced 10 days ago today. There had been rumors before that about what was happening and it was true. Fitbit was acquiring Pebble. Unfortunately not Pebble Inc but just the trademark and the technology. From the point of view of Fitbit I understand, they need a good operating system and it was cheaper to buy a finished one. Pebble Inc was in bad economic state and it would not have been that god deal to acquire Pebble Inc, cheaper to just let it default.
That means that all company presence, support and future development to my beloved watch is gone. At the moment everything still works, the app i still there in Google Play, all cloud services are still online but that will change. I guess that the cloud services are the first one to go, they talked about releasing some of the code open source but that assumes that it’s possible to redirect the API calls to my servers. I guess that in the future the app will stop working, maybe Android 8, perhaps 9 and then the app and Pebble will be useless. The positive thing is that there are knowledge out there how to implement the watch to phone interface, I successfully used RockWork on my Ubuntu Touch for several months.
The scary thing for me is the Pebble OS, it’s mostly closed source and I’m not sure what’s possible for the community to do. If we are able to hack it, or perhaps replace it we have struck gold. It doesn't matter what happens with the app, or the API:s, because we can fix it, and the watch have once again a future.
Of course, in the end the watch will fail, break or maybe refuse to charge, or even more likely just feel old by a future standard and then we need new hardware and we need to look for another company. Possible Fitbit will have made a watch then, who know, it’s possible. But I think it’s more likely that my next watch will be made by someone else, time will tell!
For now, I will continue with my Pebble. It’s still useful for notifications, set alarms, check calendar/events at the timeline, control my podcast on my commute to work and finally of course check the time.
