When Fitbit announced that they would be acquiring Pebble, they also announced that they would be halting the sales of Pebble devices. Basically from what we can tell, Fitbit has no desire to keep the Pebble brand around and sell its products alongside their own, but there is some good news.In a post on Pebble’s developer blog, Pebble has confirmed that despite the acquisition and halting of sales, Fitbit is expected to keep Pebble’s services alive through 2017. According to the company, “Fitbit is going out of its way to keep Pebble software and services running through 2017.”
They also add, “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.”
This is no doubt good news as new Pebble owners will have at least one year with their devices until services are stopped. However this does not mean that after that your Pebble devices are essentially paperweights. We reckon you should still be able to use the watch, just that certain services will no longer be available. According to Pebble, “The mobile app updates will ensure the operation of core Pebble functions, even with cloud services discontinued—they won’t break functionality.”
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