Palm says no webOS SDK till end of Summer
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted June 19th 2009 3:26PM
posted June 19th 2009 3:26PM
With the Pre now in customers' hands and reports of webOS hacks in the news, we know that you are more anxious than ever to get access to the SDK and start developing for webOS.
We've been working very hard on the SDK and are eager to open access on a wider scale, but the software and the developer services to support it just aren't ready yet.
This should come as a bit of a blow to developers hoping to get cracking on Pre software, and will unquestionably turn those who can't bear the wait towards the fully stocked iPhone or Android platforms. However, Palm does say that they'll be opening the program up a bit wider, stating in the post that they plan to crank the number of devs with the early SDK in their hands up from "hundreds to thousands" over the next few weeks. Apparently, that's part of process the company is beginning to ration out access, building to a full release.
Another bit of puzzling wordsmithing in this post comes in the form of the company's stance on homebrew and DIY "experiments" (their words) which have come to light in the past couple of weeks. So says Palm:
As on any popular platform, we recognize that some developers will experiment in ways that cross official boundaries, but we believe that our formal offerings – and community efforts built around those offerings – will provide the best experience for the vast majority of webOS developers and users.
So while it's not exactly a keep-off-the-grass statement, it certainly reads vaguely as to whether or not the company will lock out jailbreakers hoping to dive deeper into webOS. Further confusing the matter? Palm has just released the Linux source code used to compile the Pre's firmware, making the possibility of cooked / custom ROMs a very serious reality, and obviously opening the floor to a lot of said experimentation. Mixed messages? Yes. Our word to Palm right now? Put every effort into getting that SDK out, or you're at risk of quickly burning through all the good will you've just engendered.
Update: We've added some info above which reflects Palm's statement that it will be considerably widening its pool of developers over the next few weeks with access to the early SDK.
Read - An update on the early access program and the SDK
Read - Open source packages
I think the fail whale is swimming through for Palm, yet again. What is wrong with this company? They've failed for several years to get a modern OS out onto the market, created the flop known as the Foleo less than 2 years ago, and now this?
More desperation from the iGang.
If it wasn't so blatant, it would be funny.
haha, yeah right... someone somewhere will find some "leaked" webOS SDK and will give it to every friggin person on the planet.. you know it will happen.... ;)
I thought the Moojo SDK was already out like months ago. This is a disappointment.
As a Pre owner the experience I've had with the device as well as Sprint (so far) has been very good but this will definitely hamper any momentum that Palm had going for it.
Sadly the only options we have in North Dakota, for a decent smart phone, is Pre or Blackberry and I had decided to jump head first into the Pre but was really looking forward to the additional apps.
It seems pretty expected these days to have an SDK with your OS. But in all fairness, the iPhone (and iPhone OS) was out for 9 months before developers got their SDK. The App Store didn't go live until a full year after the iPhone had debuted. Sure, getting the SDK out there would help push the Pre's momentum, but what's 3 or 4 months?
The iPhone wasn't competing against a hugely popular phone with apps as a centerpiece feature
"The iPhone wasn't competing against a hugely popular phone with apps as a centerpiece feature"
So?
It was competing against entrenched players that had years worth of app development.
To be fair, Apple classified the iPhone as a high-end feature phone when it released, which is something that nobody expects an openly available SDK for. The Pre has always been known as a smartphone, and releasing a smartphone with no SDK available is a pretty crappy thing to do.
Ok I ran a test none of you have run guaranteed.
I own a $1200 pioneer touchscreen 7" car stereo.
I syncd iPhone stereo bt audio option n played music as wel as palm pre over a2dp.
iPhone played flawlessly , pre was static city in comparison it blows.
Just thought I'd share that,Run your own test tell me what u think,??
I stream bluetooth audio via a Pioneer headunit with the Pre on a daily basis and it is crystal clear. Sounds to me like you are a hater.......What's cool about streaming music with the Pre is that if I am running Sprint Navigator in the background, whenever an upcoming turn or exit is coming up, the app that is playing music, whether it be Pandora or the music app, turns down the volume of the song playing and Sprint Navigator announces the directions, and then the music resumes at it's regular volume.
But as far as webOS SDK, I am also rather disappointed in this news. Although I do understand that this is a brand new platform and many bugs need to be worked out, I'm not sure I will be around long enough to be able to utilize these apps. The phone is amazing but the voids I was hoping would be filled with 3rd party apps don't seem to be working out that way. By the time SDK many of those who decided to give Sprint and the Pre a 30 day test run will be gone, along with Sprint's hopes of regaining the millions of customers they have lost over the years. Palm dropped the ball on this one.
I've had absolutely no problem with the Pre playing music to a Bluetooth car stereo.
No idea where you're getting static from. Doesn't even make sense - static over a digital connection?
@Jon
You do know he's lying, right?
Troll ears cannot hear anything without static except what they want to hear.
I think the Pre has a great future ahead of it. Apple offers a great set of tools under its SDK, Palm wants to make sure they are up to par. I believe developers will embrace the unrestricted Web OS platform and the good faith Palm has shown.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
OMG, FIRST!!!!!
ROFL and I am a 56k modem!
Need more Pre news.
Not the best news, certainly, but worse, for the moment, is that the App Catalog has been stuck at 30 apps for the past week. Delaying wide spread access of the SDK will be intolerable if the apps don't keep coming.
No SDK means lame OS. No?
Other site reporting iPhone 3gs will break 72 hour zero to million sales record!!!!!!!
Set back on 071108
Pretty speedy sales. Shame the 3G S itself looks slower than the Pre in every head-to-head so far.
Bummer for Pre people. When I shop for a smartphone, the SDK is every bit as important as the device's features and usability. Google did this one right by releasing their beta Android SDKs to the full public a year before the phone came out and letting joe programmer try it out and report issues back to them.
This whole concept that only premier developers can have the SDK is for closed platforms like game consoles, you can't classify your device as a smartphone until you have a public SDK in my opinion.
No SDK until summer, and no user base until, well, ever.
i never remember Palm telling they were releasing the SDK immediately after the release.. they always said it was going to be released in "a few months" and btw end of summer isn't too far away..
and abt the apps , i have abt 6 or 7 pages of apps in my ipod touch, but i hardly use more than 10 of them right now.. so i DONT think the Apps would matter MUCH to the mass public.. it will be important to the power users who are dont constitute a major portion of the public, and i am not sure u can call some1 a power user if they can forego multi-tasking..
at some people telling why WAIT for a few months when u can get an App now, it is because of the better UI on the PRE.. except true universal search i dont see anything better on the iphone and well the large amount of apps but i seriously miss the multi-tasking in my ipod touch.. and the same black background with the same icons for applications has gotten boring to look at..
2nd paragraph, very true. I hardly use any of my iPhone apps, even though I like all the ones I have installed. I don't miss my jailbreak since the 3.0 upgrade because I never really used the jailbreak apps.
And of course releasing an SDK quickly means nothing if the SDK is crap. It needs to come out soon, AND be good.
ALL HAIL THE NERD KING! He goes on TV to shill the iPhone 3GS with a wink and a nudge from Cupertino, then days later tries to act like he's objective in writing a story around the Pre SDK.
The developers *that matter* already have the SDK, or will have it soon. Amateurs and DIY'ers will have to wait -- cry me a river. Apple did the same thing, waited a LONG time to let the SDK trickle down to every dork planning a light sabre app because they didn't want to undermine stability or have bad press wreck the good word of mouth they had going.
"Mixed messages" about opensource/discouraging hacking -- yeah that's called Palm having a contract with Sprint that mandates they will act if people cheat/circumvent their TOS.
Here's who I really feel bad for: The 95% of iPhone users on the previous two generations of hardware that are getting left behind (starting with Video Recording) while the iPhone 3GS and Pre - which share identical processors - will be running circles around them. I'd hate to be Apple right now, in the unenviable position of not being able to turn on preemptive multitasking for fear of splitting and angering the userbase. Palm, OTOH, will waste no time in leveraging the Pre's multitasking (think inbound Skype calls) so let's see where we're all at in another 3-6 months, shall we.
Actually I think some of the cooler and more innovative iPhone apps have been from small dev houses or individuals, so it does matter.
Of course Palm has the disadvantage of having WebOS come out very recently, no developer community yet. But as you mention, they have some things going for them too in terms of being more nimble and less bound to the past hardware. Plus they have the image of being cutting edge because the 3GS was playing 'catch-up' to the Pre's hardware.
Glad i returned this thing yesterday.....Sprint tried to give me a hard time saying there's a $35 restocking fee..lol I told the guy to read the receipt again and told him he is just like all the other sprint employees, don't have a clue whats going on.
Jeez lay off them. They're just trying to debug the OS itself at this point!
How long did it take iPhone to get us an SDK.. hmm? Or to even decide to consider one??
I have both Palm Pre and iPhone 3G S today.. and I must say.. AT&T SUCKS ASS!!! Sprint's EVDO is wayyyyy faster for data xfer. It's not even close!
@boblobb:
You're wrong about this: the Pre can do data+voice, if Wi-Fi is on.
But I would note that at least the Pre can do either... in the building where I work, which is smack-dab in the middle of a major city, the iPhone gets NO SERVICE in my office!! Meanwhile the Pre gets 1.4 MB/sec data and crystal clear voice!
So I called AT&T tech support and they said it's because their service "is not guaranteed to work inside buildings" O.o and he said that their 850MHZ spectrum does not go through walls very well. (Sprint uses 1.25 GHz EV-DO Rev. A which works just fine in buildings.)
Frankly... iPhone has a bigger screen but the color isn't very good and it looks more pixelated compared with the Pre. It cannot display high-rez JPEGs... they pixellate when you zoom in, unlike the Pre.
The Pre's multitasking is freaking sweet. Once you get used to flicking through your open apps you may never want to go back.
The presence of a universal "back" gesture is great. Also, the Pre apps let you change their preferences *from within the app* whereas on iPhone you must exit the app and then go to the Settings app and then set it then go back... annoying.
The iPhone forces you to view all your mail as separate accounts.. why can't it import my OS X mail folders???? The Pre lets me view all new mail in one screen!
I much prefer syncing to Google's cloud, now, to be honest having tried both ways. I have MobileMe but EVERYONE has gmail, and getting them my Google Calendars is much more convenient than having them deal with MobileMe calendars.
I have both but honestly, if I can't get reception where I work on the iPhone, and the network speeds are SLOW AS MOLASSES even when both have 5 bars... then for all its flaws and lack of apps.. the Pre is a much better choice (because it actually works! and it's not on a piece of crap network!).
Seriously thinking about returning the iPhone.
If iPhone enthusiasts are so confident in their phone's success, why go to the trouble of trashing the Pre as so many do here? Seriously. If you feel that the Pre is no threat to your own phone's development, then why waste your life reading a pre thread at all. Are you trying to save potential Pre buyers from making what you consider a terrible mistake, out of a sense of goodwill? Instead you come across like denominational religious partisans.
seriously guys, 50,000 apps is a lot, but how many of them would be used ??? 10? 30? 50?
Palm - release a stable sdk, optimize the OS
but release that GSM version asap
btw the things are going on at predev wiki and palmcentral forum, im already sold, im buying one as soon a GSM version is out...
this will probably hurt Palm for a little while but depending on the apps, it can always turn around. Quality apps will always keep peopel coming back. I wonder if it'll have similar restrictions to that of Apple?
http://ziggytek.com/
Palm, why not just steal iPhone sdk, just like you steal iTunes for syncing media content.
Like I think I said at the time, they really really needed to have this out in the early part of this year, if they wanted to have any hope of making a dent in the app store business. It really is just too late at this point. Palm's only hope now is that the phone somehow takes off on it's own, without the help of much of an app store, which would give them time to bring the app store up to par. The phone does get good word of mouth, I guess we'll see. This summer will be the critical time for the pre, though.
Anyone know where I can find that wallpaper being used on the pre? I sort of want to use that.
The clock is ticking.