Palm may have wowed gadget geeks with its new Palm Pre phone but the company seems to be having a much tougher time convincing application developers to get on board.
The Pre’s app store, known as the App Catalog, had just about 30 apps one week after the device’s June 6 launch. The number has remain unchanged since then, says Medialets, a mobile analytics and ad targeting company.
“This number is a mere fraction on what we’ve seen at launch for other app stores,” says Rana Sobhany, vice president for Medialets.
What’s kept developers away has been the fact that the software developers’ kit hasn’t been easy to get, and the low user base of the Palm Pre compared to rivals such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, say industry watchers.
Palm released the Pre on June 6 exclusively on the Sprint network. But the company has not been saying much about the Pre’s app store to date.
Since Apple first introduced the idea of an integrated store for third-party programs with the iPhone, other smartphone makers have been trying to catch up. The iPhone’s app store, which launched in July 2008, has become a hugely popular feature among its users, who have downloaded the store’s more than 50,000 apps over 1 billion times. It has also helped create a new generation of mobile developers, some of whom have struck it rich creating games and other applications for the phone. Since the iPhone’s launch, other companies including BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, Nokia, and Google have launched their own stores for mobile software.
Nine days before the Pre launched, Pre’s App Catalog went live with 4 apps (Classic, Sudoku, Today Show, and Where). By launch day it had grown to 18 apps total, says Medialets, and now stands at 30.
One reason for the slow start could be that Palm has been very selective about giving out the Software Developers Kit (SDK) prior to the device’s launch.
In fact, the SDK is still not widely available. A Palm spokesperson said the apps in the Pre catalog are “preview apps from select developers.” “We have not announced nor fully rolled out our SDK publicly,” said the spokeswoman.
That may be a reason why all the apps in the App Catalog store, with the exception of one, are still in the beta mode, says Medialets.
Palm’s moves have turned off at least one developer. “Palm is only sharing their SDK with top secret developers,” says Robert Patterson, director at Nex Studios, which has created apps for the iPhone and Sony PlayStation 3. “So screw them, we’ll keep developing for a platform like iPhone that already has millions of users.”
Patterson says he is impressed the Pre’s operating system but the lack of widespread availability of the SDK and the tiny number of Pre users makes it not worth the development effort for small shops. “The market is not there yet for the Pre,” he says. “So, to be honest, we don’t really care about Palm right now.”
If other small developers share Patterson’s feelings, it could spell doom for Palm’s Pre App Catalog.
Palm’s selective distribution of the SDK for developers is in contrast with how the company wooed programmers before the device’s launch.
The company’s biggest promise for WebOS, the new operating system that powers the Palm Pre, is that it would be easy to develop for. In February, Palm held an online tutorial that touted the ease of creating an app for the Pre using HTML and JavaScript.
Ted Wugofski, chief technology officer at mobile app company Handmark, agrees that developing apps for the Pre is easy. Handmark was one of the select few developers to have its app, Express Stock, available in the Pre Catalog at launch. “The Pre requires simpler technology for apps and we found the development process to be fairly smooth,” says Wugofski.
Handmark worked closely with Palm, which reviewed the app’s interface and suggested changes, he says. “They guided us and let us know how they wanted the UI to be,” says Wugofski.
The move indicates Palm wants to offer users the best experience with apps in the Pre Catalog. But somewhere along the way the company may have gotten too controlling, suggests Patterson, skewing the game in favor of large companies. “I can understand they want to offer users apps of the highest quality at launch but it also makes it difficult for smaller developers to participate,” he says.
It is not clear if Palm will adopt an approval process for apps on the Pre similar to what Apple does for the iPhone. Handmark says Palm’s involvement with its app creation process was because the company didnt’ have a set of published guidelines for Pre developers yet. Handmark didn’t have to go through an approval process because Palm chose to partner with it.
What may be encouraging for developers is that the Pre App Catalog publishes data on how many times each app has been downloaded, which other app stores don’t, says Sobhany. “Apple’s App Store listed downloads only for a couple of hours post-launch before they were made unavailable,” she says. “Android Market provides buckets of download ranges which, at the low end are helpful, but at the upper end vary widely.”
Palm has also not disclosed the revenue sharing arrangement it will put in place for developers for the Pre Catalog.
“Since the SDK is not public yet, we have not disclosed the details,” says a Palm spokeswoman.
See also:
Palm Scores a Modest Hit, Despite Problems
Photo: Pre App Catalog (rhastings/Flickr)
Right, so bear with me here: this week our apps are all about learning new things, understanding the world around you, meeting new people, playing extremely silly games in large groups. Sort of like being a kid again! No? Ok.
iPhone 3.0 apps are still dropping fast and furious, left and right, cats and dogs, etc, but there’s some reprieve for non-3.0 stragglers this week, too. Morning music? Personal broadcasting? Smug food habits? It’s all here.
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