I’ve had a palm device of some sort since 10th grade when I got the PalmPilot Personal. After 13 years and about 8 devices (that I had), Palm FINALLY developed a brand new, ground up operating system known as WebOS and put it in a sleek new phone, the Palm Pre (for the record, I was in line at 6am on release day to get my Pre – yes, I’m a fanboy). In that time the screens, processors, keyboards, and even the company have changed, but one thing has generally remained constant.
A commitment to an open source operating system and NOT preventing developers from taking control of the device. As far back as I can remember (and before I had ever heard the term Homebrew refer to anything other than coffee) users have been able to download freeware, shareware and paid applications to extend the functionality of their Palm device and to customize their experience.
Long time users will remember applications like Technician and Butler that let you tweak just about every setting the device had (and even a few it wasn’t supposed to have). Over time, Palm took a number of these features and integrated them into the core OS, thus improving the experience even for those users not quite nerdy enough to be messing with their PalmPilot.
Now the Palm Pre has saved Palm as a company (fingers crossed), but the pattern remains the same. WebOS is Linux based so it’s open source by nature. It took less than 5 days for the first hello world app to hit engadget and within 3 weeks we we’re all basking in the glory of a homebrew community. While the folks over at Apple are constantly battling their developers and rejecting applications Palm has embraced their developer community at an almost unprecedented level. It’s not that Palm doesn’t reject apps from their own app store, it’s that Palm encourages (at least, makes no effort to stop) developers from creating and distributing applications outside of their store.
For the record, iPhone users can install custom apps, but the phone has to be ‘JailBroken’ and until recently this was a pretty risky task. The term itself implies the problem iPhone developers face. The iPhone platform is in jail…inaccessible from the outside world without significant effort and criminal acts.
The nice people over at PreCentral.com have setup a homebrew app store that is constantly growing with custom apps from the homebrew community (admittedly, of a varied quality). So, now, any user with even basic skills can get in on the homebrew goodness. I’m currently playing with about 20 different apps that would never have existed if they had to go through an approval process. Not because they don’t deserve to be in an app store, but because the developers might not be able to do all the necessary work to get approved, or because Sprint wouldn’t like it, or any number of other reasons. Some developers are using the homebrew community as their beta testing platform and last time I checked about 10 of the applications that started out on PreCentral have already graduated to the official App Store and that number will continue to grow.
In the other direction, developers have found that Palm has coded, but commented out a number of features. That is, the code is there, on the phone…it’s just not enabled. So, what’d the developers do? They enabled those features and Palm, whether they like it or not, gets tons of free feedback from a very knowledgeable community. The fact is that everyone benefits, the users and the corporations.
My point in all of this is that, in the long run, giving the power to the users, especially in consumer electronics, will help more than it will hurt. Sure, you’ll get the occasional bad app or bricked device, but overall, letting the community work together to come up with the best possible solution IS the best possible solution.
Hackers have known this for a long long time, but as social networking comes to the forefront of our society and crowdsourcing a solution becomes commonplace, you’ll hear more and more about Open Source this and Homebrew that…and that’s a good thing for everyone.
Follow @StartupArmy for articles on technology, startups, social media and more!Jeff Shariat is SVP of Operations for Startup Army, a Venice, CA based startup accelerator. For more information visit www.startuparmy.com.
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r @chuq interesting take on palm and homebrew and open source: [link to post]
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interesting take on palm and homebrew and open source: [link to post]
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Great Article on #palmpre #homebrew: RT chuqinteresting take on palm and homebrew and open source: [link to post]
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Ah….”long time” is NOT Butler and Technician. Long time is Datebk3 and Trip and Handyshopper and…… BUT – great post and true. If Palm had acted like Apple (a real possibility after all the hires) then it would have been over. But the developer base and both geek and powerusers are the best advanced publicity Palm could get for the Pre and Pixie. Keep it up, Palm and great post, Jeff
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RT @precentral: great post on the openness of webOS and how Palm is leveraging the developer community [link to post]
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RT @precentral: great post on the openness of webOS and how Palm is leveraging the developer community [link to post] @startuparmy
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great post on the openness of webOS and how Palm is leveraging the developer community [link to post]
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Got some Love from @precentral “great post on the openness of webOS and how Palm is leveraging the developer community” [link to post]
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This is why WebOS is great. RT @precentral: post on the openness of webOS and Palm leveraging the developer community [link to post]
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