Fitbit CEO says the company plans to launch a wearable app store “as soon as possible”
Another giant sign that a smartwatch is in the works — Fitbit wants to launch its own wearable app store “as soon as possible,” the company's co-founder and CEO James Park said in an interview at CES earlier today.
Context & Ripple Effects
A month after the Pebble acquisition handed Fitbit a ready-made software platform, CEO James Park used CES to say the company wants its own wearable app store "as soon as possible." The sequencing matters: Park has said no current offering has the right feature set and battery life for a true smartwatch, so an app store commitment is effectively a public pledge that one is coming.
The move also reads as a response to Fitbit's core problem — thin consumer hardware margins — by shifting value toward software and services, the layer where Apple already competes.
First-order effects
- Fitbit's engineering focus shifts to standing up a developer platform on Pebble's foundations, giving third-party developers a new wearable target alongside Apple's watchOS.
Second-order effects
- Competing on apps rather than step-counting hardware drags Fitbit into direct feature competition with the Apple Watch, where ecosystem depth — not device price — decides purchases.
Third-order effects
- The bet pays off slowly but visibly: the Ionic later ships with 60 third-party apps including Uber, Deezer, and Yelp, and by 2020 the Fitbit app reaches 500,000 paid subscribers — evidence that the app-store pivot becomes the template for how fitness-hardware makers convert device owners into recurring-revenue users.
The trend: Fitness wearables are evolving from closed activity trackers into app platforms, with Fitbit racing to replicate Apple's ecosystem economics before rivals like Facebook enter the same market.