I'm hoping Katharine will see this post.
I know she cautioned against installing the iOS 7 beta, but since I am involved in some extensive testing as part of the iOS for IT program, I thought I would also test the Pebble and related functionality. Without divulging details about the beta software itself, and breaching my developer agreement, I want to describe the behavior of httpebble under iOS 7 when used with one of the variants of the "weather watch" watch face. Before the beta, the watch face had a very stable connection, with all functions working as expected (time/date sync, location sync, weather & temp update, etc.).
With the iOS 7 beta installed, the httpebble app connects to the watch when launched, as expected, and the watch face displays the time, date and weather correctly. Upon receipt of any notification that is propagated to the watch, the connection between httpebble and the watch face is lost, and the weather display disappears. If you re-launch the httpebble app (actually bringing it to the foreground, since it is never closed to begin with), it still shows as being connected to the Pebble. Sometimes simply the act of bringing the app to the foreground will re-establish the connection, but sometimes you have to toggle disconnect/connect from within the app to get the connection and weather back on the watch display.
Also, even without receiving a notification, the watch face randomly loses the connection to httpebble; sometimes as quickly as 30 seconds after reconnecting, sometimes not for many minutes, sometimes not at all. If I had to guess, since the httpebble app still shows a connected state when brought back to the foreground, the new multitasking features announced with iOS 7 could be putting the app into a suspended state, either after a notification comes to the foreground or after a period of inactivity, that registers as a disconnect with the watch face that is looking for that connection.
If this is the cause, the new intelligent multitasking feature could potentially affect other planned Pebble apps that will rely on some minimal level of background processing to keep the connection between phone and watch active. I hope that Katharine and any other developers find this information useful. I will post updates as the other beta versions are pushed to the developer community.
It's only beta 1, so we can look forward to several months (at least) before we get to the final, stable release. Lets hope that the final version of iOS 7 will be Pebble friendly, with stable connections for notifications and bi-directional data. I'm looking forward to a day without the need to have to jailbreak or do the notification finger dance, just to get the basic functionality that was promised when Pebble was just a slick video on KickStarter.
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