Pebble Is No More ...
Posted on 09 December, 2016
Sad news this week (the formal announcement came on Thursday) that Pebble is being bought by Fitbit, and is essentially closing down — they're reimbursing anyone who has an order which hasn't already been fulfilled, which is pretty definitive.
I have many feels about this which I may get round to writing about, but at the moment the over-riding one is just sadness; reading a little about what's been happening behind the scenes it's clear that the company has been struggling for some time — which finally explains why they felt the need to fund the Time 2 on KickStarter — but I keep returning to what a great tool it could have been if, for instance, they'd been able to get greater interest from schools using it as a programming demonstrator.
Pebble had been making decent strides to improve the developer experience throughout the year — including a package-management system (I've not played with it, but think it's running on npm or otherwise based on it) and adding an option to carry out the main app development in a flavour of Javascript rather than Pebble-C — but it was all a little bit too late.
Add to that the fact that they still hadn't really cracked making a 'grown-up' product — I was really looking forward to them developing an improved version of the Time Round, which was actually a decent-looking piece, let down by a small screen and (by comparison to the rest of the range) a ridiculously short battery life; and that the whole smartwatch market doesn't really seem to have taken off yet; and I guess it's not all that surprising that they've failed.
Bugger
