With Fitbit’s acquisition of Pebble, one of the biggest concerns was whether Pebble watches would still work in the future, especially since its smartwatches software is mostly cloud-based. To help address that, Pebble released an update that’ll decouple the wearables’ dependence on cloud services. This means when Pebble’s servers shut down, users will still be able to side load apps and new firmware to the smartwatches. Of course this doesn’t address yet questions about how messaging, weather, and dictation features (which are all cloud-based) will work moving forward. But at the very least, the smartwatches can work even when Pebble gets fully absorbed into Fitbit.
Source: The Verge