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 remained unchanged since then, says Medialets, a mobile analytics and ad targeting company.
“This number is a mere fraction of what we’ve seen at launch for other app stores,” said 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 said 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 in 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 in 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 neither announced nor fully rolled out our SDK publicly,” said the spokesperson.
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 been turned off by 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 with 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 isn’t there yet for the Pre,” he says. “So, to be honest, we don’t really care about Palm right now.”