New To Palm Pre HomeBrew: Way Too Much to Fit in This Title
Homebrew apps on the Pre just keep getting better, more numerous, and easier to install. There are a ton of apps in the gallery (139 as of this posting). You can go straight here to see a listing of the most recent. We have a real file browser with Internalz, the beginning of a real facebook app with FriendsFlow, a super-fun word game in Word Whirl, and plenty more. If you're not amazed by the prolific creativity coming out of Palm Pre developers right now, well, it's time to start paying attention.
A few housekeeping notes before we get to some nitty gritty: We'll be adding new features to the gallery next week. Stay tuned for sorting by download count, recently popular, and a fully open ipkg standard feed for installers. We also hear that the fileCoaster installer has a big update coming very, very soon.
Speaking of hearing things, we hear that many of the developers who have apps in our Gallery have been contacted by Palm and will be getting their apps into the official App Catalog! When that happens, some apps will continue in Homebrew as Beta versions so you can test their future updates, some will be 'Graduates' where you can see them in the Gallery but download them from the official App Catalog. Congrats developers!
On the install front, WebOS Quick Install was updated to v2.01 yesterday and with it came many new features that will help the average user do things that previously required rooting. WebOS Quick Install is available on our forums and we'll leave the setup information to there, getting straight into the crunchy new features after the break!
Palm Opening up E-Commerce Beta for App Catalog – for-pay Apps in September
If you're a developer but have held off submitting to the App Catalog because you want to charge for your App and didn't know when Palm would implement that - take heed. Palm wants you to submit your app for consideration now for the "Palm App Catalog e-commerce beta program," which they say will open in Mid-September.
Developers get 70% of the retail price (less taxes), Palm gets 30%. Palm says that customers will be able to "easily purchase" with Visa and Mastercard, more details coming soon. Something under 70% of gross revenues -- depending on taxes -- sounds like a decent enough deal for most developers. It's the same that Apple takes - more or less - and while it might have been nice to see Palm try to beat Apple there, servers don't pay for themselves. Palm taking your credit card instead of letting carriers muck the system up: priceless.
More details should be forthcoming at the Palm Developer Network Blog, but not just yet - for now you can check out the full press release.
Update: Palm's added more details
- Developers charge a 1-time download fee (no recurring charges then?)
- United States ONLY to start. BOO.
- Still Beta, so they're being slightly more stringent now about what they're taking than they will be for the "Fall" full launch
So - Palm takes 30%, carriers are kept out of the loop, and for-pay apps are coming in mid-September. We like it - what do you think?