If you had been thinking that your beloved Pebble watch will soon become a loving and fond memory, you were completely wrong. It is not wrong to think that Pebble is coming to an end with its acquisition by Fitbit but the company is pushing hard to keep its watches alive for a lifetime. Thus, the release of a new update!
As Pebble is going through the transition of becoming one with Fitbit, the iconic smart watchmaker is giving its loyal users an update to keep their watches ticking for as long as possible. During its acquisition last year, the company announced that Fitbit had acquired its intellectual property (IP) related to software and firmware development. This meant Pebble could no longer provide you with the new watches (or the core) but said that its watches will continue to work through 2017.
But, to the joy of its users, the latest update released by the company for its iOS and Android apps ends the dependency of the watches on Pebble’s cloud servers. This means your smartwatch is now free of any shackles and can operate without depending on what Fitbit does next with their recent acquisition.
If Fitbit plans to shutter Pebble’s cloud services at some point later this year, then your watch will continue to operate normally. This further means the user community will now have full control over the ecosystem — it depends on them to keep it alive or see it wither away. You will be able to sideload apps and even the latest firmware to their smartwatches, even when Pebble’s core cloud services are not around any longer.
Talking about the change in an official developer blog post, the company adds,
Freeing the ecosystem from these dependencies means Pebble smartwatches can operate normally, even if online servers are not accessible for any reason.
This update basically means Pebble is killing its own significant cloud services to keep the complete ecosystem alive independently. It is possible that your watch will try to connect to the company’s cloud authentication server but you can skip the same and continue to use the service. This can be avoided using the new Offline Mode setting, which prevents the watch from attempting to communicate with any Pebble cloud services.
The app update has officially been rolled out for iOS users, you can get it from the App Store right here. The Android app update has currently been added to the beta channel (download here). It will officially be available on the Google Play Store quite soon. Pebble has attached the complete release notes for this update to the official blog post.
