Mozilla coders are misguided over App Store criticisms
Two prominent web developers involved with Mozilla have taken new positions at Palm, heading up developer relations for is webOS platform. While both Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith extol the open web as the future of app delivery …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands squarely in the fight mapped out in March's Browser Platform Wars coverage: whether the phone is a platform owned by a storefront operator or by the browser. Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, two Mozilla-affiliated web developers who built reputations on that side of the debate, have left to head developer relations for Palm's webOS platform.
Their stated thesis — confirmed in the reporting — is that the open web, not Apple's App Store, is the future of app delivery. Ars Technica's headline calls that position misguided, which sharpens the story: these two now speak for Palm to third-party developers, so the open-web-versus-curated-store argument has become a recruiting pitch aimed at anyone deciding where to build.
First-order effects
- Palm gains two prominent web-platform figures running webOS developer relations, handing its young smartphone OS a credible voice with exactly the HTML and JavaScript audience it needs to attract applications.
- Apple's App Store approval model now faces sustained public criticism from well-known web developers, raising the cost of the closed-store position in the eyes of the developer community both are courting.
Second-order effects
- webOS's open-web pitch forces competing handset platforms to defend curation on its merits rather than compete purely on device features — developer relations becomes a front in the phone wars, not an afterthought.
- Tooling and framework vendors serving web developers gain a new customer in Palm, which must fund documentation, SDKs, and evangelism to make its web-centric claims real for the people Almaer and Galbraith recruit.
Third-order effects
- If web-based delivery takes meaningful share of app distribution, the control point moves from whoever operates the storefront to whoever owns the browser and runtime on the device — a durable [[/concepts#platform-gatekeeper-leverage|gatekeeper leverage]] question that outlasts any single handset cycle.
- A pattern of browser-world talent migrating into mobile OS roles would signal that platform competition is consolidating around web standards as the neutral layer, pressuring every closed store to justify its toll.
The trend: Mobile application distribution is splitting between curated storefronts like Apple's App Store and open-web delivery, with developer mindshare — and the evangelists who shape it — becoming the contested resource.