One of the main reasons I went with the Pebble over other options was that I could use sleep tracking with it via a 3rd party app, without any need for their cloud. Sleep as Android has your back there. It's the only sleep tracking tool I like because it's able to keep your data locally on your phone or sync'd via a few mechanisms.
Your device will keep working yet, but what if you switch phones/tablets? Now you need to setup a new device with the watch and...oh wait... Pebble re-downloads and re-installs all the apps. If their app/servers go away, now we'll be looking up hack people wrote on github to get our devices working again.
Yeah, fortunately TiBu can backup both the Pebble app and the Bluetooth pairing. But that's basically next, modified firmwares already exist I believe, so I don't think it's unreasonable to think that if we need to use those and sideload apps we'll be able to.
I'm fairly sure that I could crack the pebble apk myself to remove the authentication stuff at the beginning if it's needed. Backing up all the apps and stuff before it's gone might be the bigger worry here.
Yeah, from what I saw with the customized firmwares it looked fairly open to tinkering.
I'll have to check out what's going on with the pebble community over there. Might be interesting to get as much reverse engineered as possible before everything goes belly up.
As for the step tracking... yeah, not sure.