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Following on from its acquisition of Pebble that was announced last week, Fitbit has announced its plans for the current (and presumably final) crop of devices’ software and services.
The parent company is hoping to put some of those fears to rest, and put up a blog post noting that it will keep Pebble software and services running through 2017.
Jon Barlow, who was previously on Pebble’s Developer Evangelist team and is now part of Fitbit’s transition effort, wrote:
To be clear, no one on this freshly-formed team seeks to brick Pebble watches in active service. The Pebble SDK, CloudPebble, Timeline APIs, firmware availability, mobile apps, developer portal, and Pebble appstore are all elements of the Pebble ecosystem that will remain in service at this time. Pebble developers are welcome to keep creating and updating apps. Pebble users are free to keep enjoying their watches.
Fitbit will work to update Pebble’s mobile apps and reduce their dependence on scattered cloud services for things like authentication and analytics in the coming months. Following on from that update, Pebble Health will continue to work as normal, becuase it doesn’t rely on the cloud.
It still remains to be seen whether certain third-party services like dictation, messaging and weather will continue to be available after the transition update.
This update on the state of play should help to give Pebble owners some sort of relief. Though it might have a small following, Pebble’s fanbase is tremendously passionate and it is surprising to see Fitbit so unenthused about taking on board the branding of the company.
The $34 million to $40 million (£27 million to £32 million) deal will see Fitbit acquire Pebble’s intellectual property rights, but it won’t be picking up the smartwatch company’s portfolio of products.
