With wearables a hot topic at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, Pebble, the maker of the eponymous smart watch, announced its app store will go live at the end of January.

The company touts the app store as “the first open platform for sharing apps optimised for wearables”.

Developers wanting to have their titles in the app store at launch must submit them to the Pebble Developer Portal by 9 January.

Among the companies Pebble partnered with to produce apps for the smart watch are ESPN, Pandora, Mercedes-Benz and Foursquare.

The app store will be accessible from within the existing Pebble app for iOS and Android, allowing users to download apps directly to their smartphone.

“Our mission is clear: create the gold standard for wearables that mesh perfectly with your everyday life, and build the fundamental ecosystem and platform for these devices,” the company said in a blog post.

Even though Pebble owners have so far only been able to use third party resources, such as MyPebbleFaces, three million apps and watch faces have been downloaded.

Pebble also revealed that more than 300,000 Pebble smart watches have now been sold.

This compares to two million downloads and 190,000 devices in November. More than 10,000 developers were developing apps for Pebble at that point.

In November, Pebble launched the Pebble SDK 2.0 which added APIs for Javascript, Accelerometer, Data Logging and Persistent Storage. The response to the SDK 2.0 was “phenomenal”, according to Pebble. Full integration with iOS 7 was introduced at the same time.

Research firm Canalys forecast in the summer that the worldwide smart watch market will exceed five million unit shipments this year.