Pebble will soon be making the process of discovering apps for its smartwatch a whole lot easier with the rollout of a dedicated app store early next year.
Owners of the smartwatch currently have to hunt around for apps from third-party sites and the like, but the company behind the device has wisely chosen to bring some order to the proceedings.
The store will go live in the coming months and be included in the official Pebble smartphone application, the company said Wednesday.
Categories in the app store will include daily, tools and utilities, remotes, notifications, fitness, and games, with each one including a highlighted selection of recent and highly rated offerings.
The company is publicizing the store now so developers can start populating it with their work. It won’t support older apps, so some developers will need to tweak their software for version 2.0 of Pebble’s SDK, which was released last month, before submitting it to the app store.
While Pebble hopes users will enjoy using its new store to find software for its wrist-based gadget, it also understands they might, from time to time, want to continue to load up offerings from successful sites like mypebblefaces.com. With that in mind, the company is reassuring Pebble users that “third-party app stores will still work for 2.0 users and we will not prevent or block installation of applications by 3rd party websites,” adding, “We hope to serve the needs of the majority of our users and look forward to new ideas being implemented by the community in third party services.”
With the Pebble smartwatch on the market for almost a year now, many will say such a centralized app store is long overdue, but nevertheless it’s bound to be a welcome addition to the device’s ecosystem.
The watch launched at the start of 2013 following a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign that hit its $100,000 target within only a few hours of going live. After that, it went on to raise an impressive $10 million in its first month alone.
Sales have reportedly been healthy, helped by increased availability through the likes of Best Buy and Amazon.