Why so few webOS 2.0 apps?
Mood: frustrated
Posted on 2011-03-15 10:37:00
Tags: essay palmpre
Words: 276

(in response to this Precentral article)

As a developer that has apps that run on webOS 1.4.5, here are my current development choices:
1. Work on them using only 1.4.5 APIs, which means any webOS device out there can use my app. (possibly excepting people on Tercel in Mexico - what's up with that?)

2. Use some of the nifty new webOS 2.0 APIs. This means that the vast vast majority of webOS users won't be able to use the app. I don't even have a device that runs webOS 2.0 to test on.

3. Spend time trying to port them to Enyo, which is very clearly the future.

Right now my time is divided between 1 and 3. Using Metrix, I can see that somewhere around 2% of my users are running webOS 2.0+. Not to mention, even if I spent time adding webOS 2.0 specific features, those won't be highlighted in the App Catalog as far as I know.

So...yeah. There's very little incentive to spend time on webOS 2.0 right now.

--

An aside:

I have two free apps in the catalog - PasswordHash (a simple utility for generating passwords based on a master password and domain) and GAuth (generates codes for Google's two-factor authentication). PasswordHash was my first webOS application and it's really only useful if you use that password-generating scheme. GAuth is useful for anyone that uses Google's two-factor authentication. Guess which app is more popular?

Mind-bogglingly enough, PasswordHash gets downloaded ~7 times/day while GAuth is only downloaded ~2-3 times/day. (actually, PasswordHash had a day two weeks ago when it got 84 downloads!) Maybe people are misunderstanding what PasswordHash does and then deleting it?

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