Palm Pre Hits 1 Million App Downloads
It won’t send Apple running scared in Cupertino, but the Palm Pre has marked over 1 million app downloads in just 18 days of existence, which is pretty good. This number is particularly impressive when you consider the dearth of apps in the App Catalog. There were only 18 apps present in the Catalog when the Pre launched, and there are only 30 in there today.
The App Catalog is still a place with echoes in the halls, as it is largely empty, but with download numbers like this, maybe developers will hear the call for new apps. It is estimated that Palm has only sold about 150,000 phones, and that means every Pre owner has downloaded six apps. This would imply that when Palm gets a serious number of Pres on the street, developers might expect to start making some money.
Chart courtesy Medialets
> but with download numbers like this,
> maybe developers will hear the call for new apps
Well, the problem really isn’t the developers as much as it is Palm not approving applications for the SDK fast enough. I’ve been waiting for weeks (yeah, I know, many others have been in the queue for much longer, but my application has a big name software company on it)
Developers aren’t making any money on the iPhone so there’s no reason to believe that they would on the Pre. The overwhelming majority of apps downloaded from the App Store are free and the numbers that Apple are reporting suggest that most of them are rubbish throw-away apps.
like i say , new built public toilet can attract more people to come , compare to old toilet , like brand new palm….
no offense…
So if you assume that each owner downloads no more than 4 apps then you have 250,000 Pre’s? Even worse if you assume 6 apps per user. That is just not enough number to attract Dev’s
Also…
Without SDK, this is not a good sign for the future of the webOS platform, especially when the iPhone 3GS dropped another 1 million+ handsets into the market on top of their installed base that is probably between 30-40 million worldwide.
If the webOS SDK doesn’t come until late summer or fall to the public, the webOS platform may be doomed.
Add in all the new Android devices and the fact that Blackberry and Symbian OS’s are already dominant, this doesn’t look good for the 5th wheel webOS with no public SDK.
> but with download numbers like this, maybe developers will hear the call for new apps.
Umm, I can’t get the SDK to write for the platform, so although I would like to develop for it I can’t.
That might be part of the problem.
Please do not let that 1 million apps downloaded make you think all is well.
Most of us have been redownloading the same apps.
for example, the one and only “game” that has a little merit to download is connect4. However, they limit you to 10 games then shut you down.
I bet I must have downloaded that same app over 200 times.