New Pebble update allows watches to keep working once online servers go dark
One of the biggest questions for Pebble owners following the company’s acquisition by Fitbit last year has been how long their watches would keep working going forward. And while Pebble had announced at the time
that Fitbit would be “going out of its way” to keep the smartwatch
platform’s software and services running through 2017, there hasn’t been
much news of what would happen past that point, especially given that a
fair portion of Pebble’s software is cloud based.
To help address those issues, Pebble released an update
this week that decouples the smartwatches from their dependency on
cloud services, meaning that whenever Pebble’s servers do shut down,
users will still be able to side load apps and new firmware to their
smartwatches.
It’s not a perfect fix, and there are still plenty of
answered questions. Features like dictation, messaging, and weather, for
example, are all based on cloud services, and Pebble still hasn’t
commented on whether or not it’s found a way to keep those working for
users going forward. Still, at least Pebble fans will be able to
continue to use the basic features of their watches, even as the rest of
Pebble is absorbed into Fitbit.
The article was published on : theverge
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