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Fitbit Won't Kill Off Pebble Services At Least Until 2018 (thenextweb.com)
Earlier this week, Fitbit announced that it was buying up the assets of smartwatch maker Pebble, and a lot of questions still exist around exactly how Pebble's existing products will work. Today a member of Pebble's developer team attempted to address some of those questions. From a report on The Next Web: In a blog post, it noted 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."
Anyone know where I can get a Pebble cheap
Yet another company whose products that people paid good money for will just stop working. Sure, they have a year's reprieve, assuming that promise isn't reneged upon at some point. This is why I don't buy anything that's "cloud enabled," I don't even mess with games anymore because they all require some online DRM component. I've been burned too many times when the stuff I bought stopped working.
So people have a one year grace period, which conveniently is also probably how long it will take to completely resolve the transition of assets, intellectual property, etc.
And this is supposed to be a good thing?
Whew... because I never use a watch longer than a year!
Oh thank god for the mercy!
And all this for free?! It's so nice of you not to charge more.
Keep an eye on Gadgetbridge if you use Android. They have already replicated a lot of what keeps your Pebble working, and if we're lucky they'll tie into using Google's voice recognition or a service of your choice. If their app would download METAR reports to give you the weather for wherever you are that would pretty much give you everything you need (that I use, anyway) that is cloud-connected.
I'm just curious, much like my Cyanogened Android Phones that are disconnected from Google, use F-Droid, talk to OwnCloud, eGroupware, are there watches and other devices which can send information to internally controlled network systems, distinct from any sort of service provider.
Fitbit signed the death warrant when the news went out that they bought some of Pebble's IP and nothing else. Who in their right mind would buy a Pebble now, knowing that it's working from borrowed time?
If the device didn't rely on external servers to function, that's one thing. But the news reports said that it did, and those things will be around for maybe a year at best.
I had been planning on buying a couple, but there's no way I will now. I'm not going to drop hundreds of dollars on a device when I know I'll get maybe a year of life out of it before it becomes useless and needs to be thrown in the trash.
"Your watch will stop working soon, better buy a FitBit!"
"Pebble developers are welcome to keep creating and updating apps"
Sure, in the same way devs are still welcome to create apps for FirefoxOS. Who is going to bother creating apps for a platform that won't exist in 2 years?
This is what you should expect when you buy something reliant upon cloud services. At some point those cloud services will go away.
It would be nice if a law could be created that forced anyone offering cloud services to escrow full documentation / source code (including any keys required) to replicate the cloud services to be released into the public domain should the cloud services be stopped.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
This was an awesome idea -- terrible execution. I was one of the original Kickstarter backers. It took YEARS for them to, in a slightly more than half-assed way, support iOS. They claimed support from day 1, but blamed Apple for it not working (although it wasn't Apple that claimed it was working in the first place). The hardware it self was even worse. I've gotten two replacements -- after a while the "ePaper" display just stops working. The case itself disintegrated after a couple of years, apparently not designed to be used. I love the concept of the Pebble -- it's more of a VPN to a Smartphone than trying to duplicate the Smartphone, but I won't miss it, it nothing but a piling heap of goat excrement.
I've seen a number of comments elsewhere complaining about the Kickstarter campaign, and how people are getting screwed. The problem is that blame is made on the wrong place. Kickstarter is NOT a store! It is a platform for people to invest in projects, and with investment can come risk--even risk of losing your money and not receiving the product you backed. Kickstarter has an amazing reputation for some amazing projects, but not all have succeeded.
So next time you back a Kickstarter project, do so happily, but understand the potential risks.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!