In December 2016, Pebble officially announced that the company would be shut down, and would no longer manufacture or continue support for any devices, nor honor any existing warranties.

[19][20] The original Pebble Smartwatch was designed based on a concept by Eric Migicovsky describing a watch that could display messages from a smartphone and select Android devices.

Migicovsky's company, Pebble Technology, launched a Kickstarter campaign on April 11, 2012, with an initial fundraising target of $100,000.

[2] After overcoming manufacturing difficulties with the prototype design, Pebble started mass production with Foxlink Group in January 2013, initially producing 15,000 watches per week.

[40] The Pebble has a waterproof rating of 5 atm, which means it can be submerged down to 40 metres (130 ft), and was tested in both fresh and salt water, allowing the user to shower, dive or swim while wearing the watch.

[42] Applications included notification support for emails, calls, text messages and social media activity; stock prices; activity tracking (movement, sleep, estimates of calories burned); remote controls for smartphones, cameras and home appliances; turn-by-turn directions (using the GPS receiver in a smartphone or tablet); display of RSS or JSON feeds; and hundreds of custom watch faces.

CEO Eric Migicovsky announced on January 9, 2013, that updates for the watch's operating system would be released every 2–3 weeks until all features were added.

[45] The watch's firmware operating system is based on the FreeRTOS kernel and uses Newlib, the STM32 Peripheral Library, the Ragel state machine compiler, and an unnamed UTF-8 Decoder.

It is open source, does not require account creation, and supports features such as notifications, music playback and watch application installation/removal.

[52][53] Eventually, Pebble SDK version 1.0 was released was limited to development for watch faces, simple applications, and games.

SDK version 2.0 (later renamed PebbleKit) was released on May 17, 2013, and added support for two-way communication between Pebbles and smartphones running iOS or Android via the AppMessage framework.

[54] As of February 2015[update], the PebbleKit SDK included APIs to access bluetooth messaging, background workers, the accelerometer, the compass, and supported C and JavaScript (with some limitations) for developing apps.

[57] CNET praised the design, readability, and water-resistance of the Pebble Steel, but criticized the limit of eight user-installed apps and the lack of a heart-rate monitor.

Pebble's second generation comes with various improvements over its predecessors, such as a 64-colour e-paper display with Gorilla Glass[63] a thinner and more ergonomic chassis, plastic casing and a microphone.

The Pebble Time also included a new interface designed around a timeline,[64] which is similar to what was found in Google Now on Android Wear.

In December 2015, all remaining Pebbles got a firmware update, enabling support for the timeline and removing the maximum of 8 apps-restriction, letting additional apps load directly from the connected phone.

[70] Pebble 2, the company's 3rd generation smartwatch, launched on Kickstarter on May 24, 2016, with an offer period of 36 days at discounted introductory pricing, and shipment of the new models anticipated in the October–November 2016 timeframe.

[74] On December 7, 2016, Pebble Technology filed for insolvency[75] with Fitbit acquiring much of the company's assets and some employees.

The selling of Pebble brand to Fitbit was credited to Charles River Ventures who invested $15 million in the company in 2013.

The remainder of Pebble's assets, including product inventory and server equipment, was set to be sold off separately.

[81][82][4] An unofficial developer group called Rebble was created to extend support for the Pebble watches' online services that were discontinued on June 30, 2018.