Palm Pre Development? Meh.

I am a proud owner of the Palm Pre. It's slick, fast, and pretty cool. There are only 136 apps in the Pre's app store, compared to the iPhone app store's several thousand (or more), that's not much at all. So, naturally I was inclined to want to write some apps and sell them, hopefully making a nice return. If you don't already know, the iPhone Developer program has you pay a one time fee of $99 and you're free to post up your apps to the iTunes App store, and make a fantastic 70% of profit. I was hoping for something similar with the Palm dev program.

I went on their site to download the Mojo Software Development Kit, and found this:

Recognizing the value of the on-device catalog as a distribution channel and as a friction point to control the flow of apps into it, we’re going to charge $50 for each app you submit to this channel.

Really? To add friction? Seriously? A lot of the complaints that the Pre App store has gotten have been based around a lack of good apps, and Palm wants to add "friction" to this?


The SDK is just as annoying as the cartoon character.


I hate to say it, but I'm kind of disappointed with Palm, guess I'll stick with iPhone development.