Pebble 2.0 launched last week. It finally introduced a new storefront that highlights watchfaces and apps built for Pebble, as well as some that use companion apps for the watch. The problem is that it launched only for the iPhone, leaving thousands of Android users wondering why they can’t run Pebble apps as freely as their iPhone-wielding friends.
Kean Wong, who leads the engineering group at Pebble, has posted a lengthy blog explaining why Pebble 2.0 for Android isn’t ready yet. You can read the full text here, but the short answer is that Android development is complicated and Pebble doesn’t have enough people to work on it fast enough. We’ve seen this excuse/explanation dozens of times, and Wong paints a picture of the complexities of Android being tougher to master than anticipated. He writes:
The Pebble Android app uses Bluetooth heavily, includes a Javascript runtime environment, accesses the internet and talks to the Pebble without interrupting the user experience, integrates with the Pebble appstore, works on a myriad of (over 1000) different Android devices, runs on 27 different versions and flavors of Android 4.x, and must continue to run in the background even if other apps in the system use up all the memory, or the Android device powers down or resets. All of this has to work elegantly and reliably for many thousands of Pebble Android users.
Pebble already has released 2.0 to developers and is awaiting more testing and feedback before it reaches a point where it can comfortably release the updated app to Android users. The company is also actively seeking qualified engineers so this problem doesn’t happen again in the future.
