Developers have been working on apps for Google Glass for as long as Glass has been available to them. But until Glass comes out of its closed “explorer program” and becomes widely available, those apps will sit mostly unused. Other wearable tech tend to be screen-less devices that rely on syncing with a set mobile app. You can only use that one app for the device, there’s no room for a collection of apps connected to the wearable. The point is, while wearable tech is starting to get off the ground, there hasn’t been an app surge like we saw with smartphone apps. These emerging devices are just that – emerging. No one has quite figured out how to make them widely available and popular while also incorporating apps, let alone launching a curated wearable app store. Until now. Originally announced at CES, the Pebble smart watch will soon have its own full fledged app store complete with third party apps you can use on the watch.
The widely available watch has seen decent adoption and reportedly has 300,000 users. Apps have been available for a while through third parties (with pretty impressive download numbers), but Pebble is getting ready to put those apps in one place and make it easy to discover and manage them. From the Pebble Blog:
We’re getting ready to launch the Pebble appstore—the very first open platform for sharing apps optimized for wearables. The appstore will live within the existing Pebble app on your iOS or Android device, so you can find and download Pebble apps directly from your smartphone. …
Until now, Pebblers discovered apps and watchfaces thanks to wonderful third party resources like MyPebbleFaces. In fact, 3 million apps and watchfaces have been downloaded so far. …
Pebble appstore makes browsing easy, with categories for Daily, Remotes, Games, Notifications, Tools & Utilities, Fitness, and—of course—Watchfaces. We’re making it easier than ever to find your next favorite app for things like tracking your workout, managing your music, or controlling your thermostat.
Pebble also found a clever, easy way to address the space limitations of a watch-sized device. According to Kevin C. Tofel of Gigaom, who got a sneak preview of the Pebble appstore, the watch itself can only hold eight apps at a time, but users can store other apps in their app store locker and easily switch them out as needed via a mobile phone.
On the iPhone, the Pebble app is expanded to show off software in the appstore and is also the mechanism to get apps on the smartwatch. Likely because of memory limitations, you can only push eight apps to the Pebble. But there’s an app locker in the software that can hold more apps; you can pull apps off the Pebble to swap them out from the app locker quite easily.
The store will host apps in six categories (seven if you count watchfaces) and because many of these apps were available though third party sources before the official Pebble appstore, the store will launch with a decent number of app options – including ESPN, Yelp, GoPro, Foursquare, Pandora and some other big names.
Like any software application store, Pebble smartly categorizes the apps by type: Daily, Notifications, Fitness, Tools & Utilities, Remotes, and Games. There are also recommended top picks and essentials, plus you can search by an app name. Unlike most new app stores, there’s a fair amount of software to choose from, even prior to launch. Pebble says there are nearly 1,000 titles in the appstore already and more than 6,000 developers have registered to create Pebble apps.
Kevin noted that a few of the apps were a bit basic in terms of features, but that’s to be expected as developers figure out what you can and can’t do on something as small as a wearable.
If the Pebble keeps on growing in popularity and its appstore is a success, this could be the start of the wave of wearable tech apps Gartner is predicting.