Back on December 1st a report surfaced that Fitbit was acquiring Pebble, the longtime company who helped usher in the market of smartwatches. One week later, it was official that Fitbit was buying Pebble for the rumored amount of somewhere close to $40 Million. Now, Pebble has confirmed that they will be shutting down the company and that their team will be transitioning to Fitbit. Pebble doesn’t give exact details as to why they have decided to close up shop, but they do mention that it was due to “various factors.” The short of it is this means that Pebble hardware will no longer be available. No more watches will be made, and they’re no longer selling or promoting devices either. As of now, Pebble hardware is no more, at least officially from Pebble as you’ll likely be able to find hardware through resellers.
Although Pebble will not be making any more smartwatches or devices of any kind in its current state, with a majority of the developers moving to Fitbit to work on wearable software at that company, it’s entirely possible that some of Fitbit’s future devices will see inspiration from Pebble’s development team in terms of features and functionality. How exactly is of course unclear, as this is the start of the transition and it could be some time before any Pebble influence would make its way into future Fitbit devices.
While no more Pebble hardware will be manufactured or sold officially, Pebble devices that are already on the wrists of customers will continue to function properly as Fitbit plans to maintain the services of the existing devices that are out in the wild. That being said, there is no guarantee that Fitbit will continue to support existing Pebble devices for any length of time, so existing users may end up experiencing a degradation in service quality and functionality of their devices. With Pebble developers moving to Fitbit, Pebble is also hoping that the dev community for Pebble will continue to work with Pebble’s dev team on the future experiences to come through Fitbit, as they urge devs in the community to join the team in their efforts going forward.