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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."
I've been burned too many times when the stuff I bought stopped working.
I bought a basis watch several years ago. Intel bought them out and their latest watch had a major recall so intel decided to shut it down. Intel gave me a check for $234 for my watch even though it wasn't even part of the recall and I had already used it for over 2 years. I found this kindof amazing but it still would have been better if they open sourced their app so that people could continue to use their watches. Ideally, devices would be created on open standards with simple apis and without vendor lock-in so that consumers could continue to use their hardware. Either that or you need to assume it's a lease with a finite lifespan. If you are storing pictures on facebook, google, etc... you really need to still have a backup elsewhere because any time they want they can pull the plug and take it all with them.
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.
Supported? No.
Are there many thousands of BETAMAX players out there that still work? Yes.
Are there shops that can repair them? Yes.
Can you still buy brand new blank tapes? Yes.
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
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
They have said that they will update the software so that the pebbles will continue working with most features intact. Please be aware that the developers in the pebble community are working on open source fixes. There is already a replacement for the Android Pebble App that is fully functional.
Pebbles should continue to live on in the wild for some time... the only real question is whether advanced features like voice dictation will still be working.