There's some exciting news today for those folks lucky enough to already have a Pebble smartwatch on their wrists, as Pebble has announced an update to the platform's software development kit known as PebbleKit. The update will allow developers to create apps that can communicate with Android and iOS apps, meaning that a phone app will be able to do things like push information to a phone app. The two-way communication will also allow Pebble apps to talk back to phone apps and control them as well.

Pebble also announced that it's releasing a special toolkit for sports app developers that will allow them to easily add Pebble support to their existing apps. The RunKeeper app already features Pebble support, but with this special bundle of tools, the hope is that additional fitness apps will bake in Pebble support.

Pebble originally began shipping out to Kickstarter backers in late January 2013, and since then, developers have been busy crafting watch faces and apps for the smartwatch. This latest SDK update could help to dramatically increase the number of apps available to Pebble owners, and the addition of two-way communication between apps means that we should start to see even more useful and interesting Pebble apps emerge. 

Meanwhile, there's also some good news today for folks that haven't yet received their Pebble smartwatch. Pebble says that its orange watches are in production this week and will begin shipping out to Kickstarter backers next week. The company has also managed to begin producing the gray and white watches in larger quantities now that both versions have passed environmental and reliability testing. There's no ETA on shipping for those units quite yet, but Pebble says that mass production can now begin and that it hopes to share more availability information in its next update.

Via The Verge, Pebble