Pebble launched its appstore for iOS early last week and promised that the Android version was “coming very, very soon.” The company yesterday provided an update on its progress. While “very, very soon” was interpreted as being a matter of days by many, it appears that it will be a while yet before we see the Android Pebble appstore. A blog post by Kean Wong who leads the software engineering group does not provide a firm ETA but does explain why it has not been released yet.
Two factors have conspired against Pebble. The first is the complexity of the Android ecosystem. Not only does the 2.0 Pebble Android app use many of the features built into Android but the numerous versions of the operating system and Android devices means “nuanced and varying characteristics” have introduced degrees of complexity that require more code fine-tuning and testing. The second factor is that the Pebble development team is still pretty small.
In order to ship a high quality, reliable Android experience that will work for many thousands of users across the myriad of devices and operating systems, we need engineers working on the Android app who are both fantastic engineers and great Android developers. We have had a very small team working on the 2.0 Android app for a long time, building up the foundational pieces of the app (such as the Javascript environment, to expose the Javascript capability enabled in many new 2.0 Pebble apps), working on the appstore integration, and doing a huge amount of work on the user-onboarding process.
Pebble has released previews of the 2.0 Android app through their developer program in order to continue stamping out bugs and refining the app until it is ready to be officially launched. It is also actively building out its developer team with more “top-notch Android engineers.”
Unfortunately, Pebble still does not have a firm ETA for the launch of the 2.0 Pebble Android app but they are working hard on making it happen.
Source : Pebble Blog