Few people remember it, but 10 years ago, Pebble was a hugely influential success story in the further development of what we now call wearable devices. And so it is that long before smartwatches became an important bet for many technology manufacturers, a group of entrepreneurs saw the future of smartwatches and, after a complete campaign of previous studies and design, plunged into the waters of crowdfunding to try to finance his bold project.

It happened, as I say, in the middle of 2012, and thanks to a combination of factors, the project gained enormous relevance, much greater than its creators imagined. To give you an idea, the financial goal of the Kickstarter campaign was to reach $100,000. The collection ended with more than ten millionand thousands of users around the world are waiting for their first smartwatch with open arms. One good friend Andrés got and still holds it with great love.

Competition? Only Sony brought their design to market that same year, Samsung did it in 2013, LG in 2014 and if you’re wondering, the first Apple Watch did not hit the market until 2015. The huge support achieved by Pebble was undoubtedly interpreted by the manufacturer as a sign that there was more than enough demand, and therefore we can understand that it was this innovative project that gave a massive starting signal for the adoption of smart watches.

A few years later, in 2015, the company tried again on Kickstarter, this time with its PebbleTime. Result? An absolute record the campaign managed to exceed 20 million dollars. The first round of Pebble was announced soon after, and overall the company’s prospects seemed overwhelming. But then came Fitbit, who acquired the company in November 2016. Users didn’t know it yet, but the beginning of the end had begun.

And that’s it Pebble was very dependent on the cloud, where a large part of the actions necessary for the functioning of their watch services were performed. Fitbit announced the shutdown of the servers, but soon after released a software update that allowed the devices to work autonomously. That way it was guaranteed to run… but good news doesn’t usually last forever, and Fitbit finally announced the end of support for the Pebble in June 2018.

A year later, in 2019, Google launched an operation to buy Fitbit, an operation that took much longer than expected, as it was not closed until 201, and therefore brought everything related to Pebble’s search engine drawers. And it’s that although these devices are no longer supported by Fitbit, there were still many of them (and still are, even today) users who remain loyal to their Pebble watches. A movement in which the Rebble group had and has a lot to do.

However, with the arrival of Android 13, everything was about to collapse, because the latest version of the Pebble software, released four years ago, is 32-bit, while Android has already made the jump to a 64-bit version only. But the good news is that Rebble and Google have created a new version of the software, this one 64-bit. In addition, Google has made it possible to sign it with the official Pebble keys that Google has and keep the integration with Google Fit.

A) Yes, this software will ensure compatibility between Android 13 smartphones and Pebble smartwatches, which we can consider as the last round for them. And it is that we can understand that this will be the last update of its software with the Pebble keys, but that it will be able to give these devices a few more years of use.

The “bad” news is this the update is not available on Google Play. Instead, they will need to go to the Rebble website and download and install the APK from there. It won’t be as convenient as updating from the Google app store, but it will definitely be worth it.