Looking for apps in all the right places

[#1]

The Palm webOS community has become a vital part of the overall platform ecosystem. Like any good user community, they provide peer-to-peer support to each other, and indispensable feedback to Palm. But for the webOS community, that’s just the beginning.

One aspect of the webOS platform that’s become incredibly popular is the “homebrew” phenomenon. Developers are free to distribute a broad range of apps and patches that do things that go beyond the officially supported development environment. Apps need to adhere to the official guidelines if their developers aim to publish them in Palm’s App Catalog, but developers can also opt to distribute their apps through other channels.

The upshot is that a robust community of developers and fans has evolved around homebrew apps, beta apps, and unofficial system tweaks. Palm generally can’t offer support for these apps, but we do support the community’s ability to create and use them (at their own risk).

Palm has created some great ways for customers to discover new apps – through the App Catalog, on the palm.com website, on our social media channels like facebook.com/palm and twitter.com/palm, and through an app called Featured Apps. Likewise, the extended community has created several parallel paths for discovering apps available outside the Palm App Catalog. 

To give our customers an overview of some of the fun and useful ways of discovering these alternative sources for apps, we thought it would be appropriate to invite a member of the webOS community to be your tour guide. So in a recent post on the Palm blog, Tim Stiffler-Dean did just that. Tim has become known in the community as a contributor to independent blogs like PreCentral.net and webOSroundup.com, as @anotherguy on Twitter who pushed the limits of his Palm Pre to see if he could live without a computer (he could), and as a frequent “twinterviewer” of notable webOS developers.

Check out Tim’s post on the Palm blog – not only will you discover some new ways to discover new apps, but you may also discover some new ways to connect with the Palm webOS community.

[#2]

You guys are awesome for giving us so many resources available to do cool things to our phones. And even when you remain open to us overclocking, patching, theming and messing around with some pretty foundational code within the OS, you do even more to make it easy for us to fix mistakes by giving us the webOS Doctor needed for 'going home'.
I wrote an article specifically about this on PreCentral, actually. With Android you have constant battles with flashing ROMs and bricking phones. With the Apple it is a violation of their end user agreement to jailbreak their devices. With HPalm it is not only allowed, but you guys actually make it easier for us to fix the big mistakes that we might make with webOSDoctor (since you can't officially support our homebrew stuff... As you said).
So you give us the freedom to do with our devices what we want. Then you give us the tools to fix things if we screw up. And now you're spreading that love by sharing with your growing userbase how easy and awesome it is to get into the homebrew phenomenon.
All of these reasons together (plus more) are why I stick with Palm. And I can imagine this is the case for a lot of fans out there. Now it's just a matter of educating the masses so that they can see the superior product that we've actually got.

[#3]

By the way, congrats on passing 5000 apps today. The 4000 in the catalog, plus all of those in Beta, Web Distribution and Homebrew channels brings us over the hill. 

Hey look, it really is greener on this other side. Here's to 5000 more.

[#4]

thank you very much for supporting homebrew!

it means a lot to use faithful WebOS devotees and we hope that you will continue to support us as we grow along with HP, Palm, and WebOS!

[#5]

I can't wait to have in my hands a Pad with WebOS, you will comunicate to the press if realliy wanna see that or not.

I'll buy it without thinking!!

Windows 7  is a poor OS vs WebOS, and with HP tecnology a Pad with WebOS, the number 1 device!!!

[#6]

To the HP of HPalm: Thank you for doing this the right way. You didn't have to and it is appreciated. You could have walked in after the aquisition and squashed Homebrew, deciding -- and not unreasonably -- that our pushing the boundries was too mich of a risk for you to take. Thank you for seeing the value of our community.

I also appreciate the legal tango you're engaged in. Offering praise that stops short of promise. I remember Rahul Sood, while speaking to, I think it was, webOSroundup, had a legal person helping him with what he could and could not say. It's a position I'm sure some think is not worth the time, effort, cost or risk. I know they're wrong. I'm just very thankful that you agree.

[#7]

I am not too sure if anyone is still veiwing on here or not, I am trying to run Webos Doctor on my Palm Pre Plus, hwoever I have downloaded the doctor twice and run it, but it tells me I have the wrong version, or not compatable to my phone, I looked up what I thought was thr ight one, yet it seems not. Please can anyone help. My phone is a palm pre plus, webos version 1.4.5, At&t, model P101una.

By the way I live in Samoa in the middle of the South Pacific and have no service to any of the providers who are listed in the phone, so I couldn't setup a Palm Profile, I purchased the phone from Australia, it was unlocked, but they hadn't setup a profile for me. I can log onto a Wi-Fi when I locate a spot.

My palm is jumping all around the place with what looks like rain drops on the screen and freezing when I try and swipe a screen, I then have to switch off and on and it starts all over and only last 5 minutes. This was a brand new phone which has only been operating for 2 months

Dave