Wearable device company Fitbit is working on its own app store. This was confirmed by the company’s CEO James Park during an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show 2017 in Las Vegas earlier this week. The CEO said that Fitbit wants to launch its own wearable app store “as soon as possible.”
It’s not surprising to see the company talk about this so soon after it decided to acquire Pebble. The new app store that it launches this year will certainly use assets taken over as part of the Pebble acquisition as a building block for the new store.
Pebble was only around for a few years but it was able to develop a robust app ecosystem for its wearable devices. The Pebble app store played host to more than 14,000 third-party apps for its wearable devices.
Park acknowledged all of the good work that Pebble did on its app store, saying that the company had “worked out a lot of the kinks” that may prevent a company from taking a chance on its own app store.
Fitbit hasn’t really made a proper smartwatch even though some of its fitness bands do offer some of the functionality that you can get from a smartwatch. If the company is working on its own app store, perhaps at some point down the line it might even think about launching a proper smartwatch.
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