Following rumors of a new ‘Nova’ operating system and smartphone line, Palm has launched an application store. It’s not quite as prolific as Apple’s offering however.
The store isn’t even built by Palm. It relies on a 3rd party platform provided by PocketGear, a company that launched an Android storefront last month. It’s no surprise that Palm opted for a 3rd party-supported app store though. With Apple’s app store blowing open the mobile application industry this year, timing is everything. And with Palm quickly losing market share to Apple, Blackberry and others it’s now or never.
The good thing about Palm’s app store is the number of applications available–5, 000 currently with roughly 1, 000 costing nothing. As VentureBeat points out, Palm only provides half the applications of the iTune’s 10, 000 but far more than Android’s measly 500.
The rush move was a smart one in my opinion. If Palm had spent the next year building its own storefront, the company would have missed the application wave. But with over 50 million devices on the market and 25 models supporting Palm store apps, the company might have timed it right. According to PocketGear founder Jud Bowman, over 1, 500 developers have submitted apps already including one from Facebook.
On the other hand developers only receive 50 percent of the software revenues, which is significantly less than Apple, Android, and Blackberry. It’s pretty likely this will be a significant deterrent to app development in the future. Developers need to eat and pay the bills too.
In the end, if Palm doesn’t roll out something spectacular at CES in January, even an app store won’t save the company anyway. In the meantime you can download the app store from PocketGear.
