The Pre App Catalog Is Tracking Way, Way Behind Apple's App Store. And It's Palm's Fault.
One month after the launch of the App Store in 2008, Apple had seen over 60 million downloads of its apps. The Palm Pre hasn't been out for a month yet, but it's about halfway there, so how close is it to that number?
Context & Ripple Effects
Palm shipped the Pre with an App Catalog that reviewers had already flagged as promising back in April's hands-on look at Pre apps — the webOS toolkit produced polished software, but the storefront itself arrived thin. TechCrunch now puts numbers on that thinness: against Apple's benchmark of over 60 million App Store downloads in its first month in 2008, the Pre is tracking at roughly half that pace before even completing its own first month.
The timing compounds the problem. Apple has spent June reasserting pressure on the category — the iPhone 3G S launch, iPhone OS 3.0, and push notifications testing all landed this month — so every week the Catalog lags is a week measured against an accelerating incumbent.
First-order effects
- Developers weighing webOS against the App Store see a half-speed audience for their work, which raises the effective cost of porting to Palm's platform.
- Palm faces direct pressure to widen Catalog submissions and speed up approvals, since the device's headline differentiator — webOS apps — is currently undersupplied.
Second-order effects
- Apple feels little competitive need to respond on pricing or curation while the gap holds; the burden of catching up falls entirely on Palm's developer-relations pipeline.
- Sprint's Pre marketing leans on the app story it cannot yet fully tell, pushing carrier messaging toward hardware and multitasking instead.
Third-order effects
- If download velocity becomes the standard scorecard for mobile platforms — as Apple's 2008 first-month figure already implies — late entrants like Palm will be judged on storefront throughput rather than handset quality alone, raising the bar for any new OS seeking third-party ecosystems.
The trend: Mobile platform competition is consolidating around app-store scale, where catalog growth rate, not hardware specs, determines whether a new entrant can sustain a third-party ecosystem.