More than six months after the Palm App Catalog virtual storefront went live in conjunction with the release of the Palm Pre smartphone, the store now boasts more than 1,000 webOS-based applications, according to data released by webOS School. By comparison, Apple's rival App Store surpassed 100,000 iPhone and iPod touch applications in early November. About 70 percent of Palm App Catalog applications are premium downloads--games is the largest category, representing 22.6 percent of all webOS apps, followed by productivity tools (14.9 percent) and sports (13.4 percent). AccuWeather's free weather information application currently tops all other webOS apps with more than 121,000 downloads in the last 30 days.
In late December, Palm released version 1.3.5 of the Mojo SDK, promising Pre user enhancements including an improved App Catalog download experience, multiple simultaneous application downloads and improved battery life in areas with poor network coverage. "At CES in January, we'll be celebrating Palm's move out of its early access program and showcasing our full production developer program and the many ways Palm is innovating in this area," Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein said during the firm's investor conference call last month. "We clearly recognize that having a critical mass of apps is important... After we open the door to all interested developers, we expect to have thousands in very short order."
For more on the Palm App Catalog benchmark:
- read this TechCrunch article