14 DAY TRIAL // Palm's webOS mobile platform has been around for a few months now, ever since Palm Pre, the first handset to run under it, reached the market on Sprint's airwaves, and it seems that it has become the platform of choice for a wide range of application developers out there. So many of them have submitted their applications to the software portal that Palm says it cannot keep up with all the requests and some solutions have been left outside for the time being.
This seems to be both good and bad news for the Sunnyvale-based company. On the one hand, it means that developers were indeed attracted by the webOS environment and the Palm Pre and future handsets based on the platform will benefit from the applications submitted to the App Catalog. On the other hand, some developers won't see their applications available on the portal, at least not as soon as they might have hopped, which could make them “unhappy,” so to speak.
According to PreCentral, Palm is already working on fixing this problem, and Palm Developer Community Manager Chuq Von Rospach already came up with a response aimed at those developers who haven't seen their apps submitted to the App Catalog just yet. “We got more applications than we could handle well, which is a good problem to have. Unfortunately, it means we dropped some things on the floor, and that's bad, but with the impending 'stuff' that's coming, this is all going to get a lot easier for everyone and a lot more transparent.”
The post on Palm’s developer discussion board continues: “If you didn't get a response in a timely manner, let me apologize to you. We should have done a better job on this, and I apologize for this. I'm working with the people I work with on this to try to make sure we do a better job of this moving forward. Good news is we've hired some people - one's started, one starts next week, and the third starts the week after that, and that'll give us some great people and some new resources to make sure this gets fixed and works properly.”
Things will certainly move to the right path in the near future, and this should make both developers and users happy. Especially with rumors regarding the revamped App Catalog that should become available starting today (the software portal is still in beta at the moment).