Palm continues to baffle me. I wrote a post the other day questioning the judgment behind withholding the WebOS SDK from the general public, and to day I find this article from Medialets. It’s an explanation of the Palm strategy to date concerning their App Catalog and includes one hugely disturbing fact.
Pre users have downloaded more than 600,000 apps.
When I read that my thoughts looked something like this: “..” “….” “……??!?!?!??!?!?!” Seriously, what the hell. The phone launch was a relative success, we know that. It wasn’t huge. It wasn’t earth-shattering, but for both Palm and Sprint it was a success.
People want apps, we know that. There have been more than a billion downloads on the iPhone, the Android market continues to grow, and now this. With just 30 apps in the Catalog, users are piling apps on to their phones. Why doesn’t the market at large have the SDK yet?
Medialets cites some interesting theories. First, most of the available apps are in beta. So what, the apps need more testing? Several of these apps are running version 0.9, as in, the last major revision before 1.0. Will they really be so different? Can developers even vouch for their app’s stability under hundreds of thousands of scrutinizing fingers? No, they can’t. Apps are nearly never bug-free at launch, and the growing pains of a new platform are part of the geeky fun of owning a brand new device.
Medialets also suggests the App Catalog isn’t ready for the deluge of submissions that would come with a public SDK. I can understand this. It’s a lot to sort through, and it’s no secret that Palm has been struggling. The number of people required to handle a hundred submissions a day, making sure they (the apps) won’t brick anyone’s Pre, is enormous. Paying those employees will be a serious expense, which leads us to the last problem: money.
It always comes down to money, and the App Catalog has no way to make any. As of today, there’s no payment system in place to reap the rewards of a well-developed app. Palm isn’t the only one hoping for a revenue stream from the store. Developers need to be paid for their time, and their best efforts should be justly rewarded, affording more time for people to put together more great apps.
The problem remains that this wasn’t planned well enough before the Pre’s launch. I can understand and even empathize with Palm for their troubles, but they botched this thing. You can’t expect to launch a phone like the Pre without planning for a payment system for apps you know people will want well in advance. I don’t want to hear “we’re working on it,” or “it’s not ready yet.” Those are crap excuses, and the only reason for them is a complete lack of foresight.
It’s getting hard to quantify success of Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone 3GS was the quietest launch of the product line so far, yet they managed to go through a million phones in the first weekend alone, and without too many hangups.
