You make a good point and that totally could be Palm's aim, but I'm willing to give Palm the benefit of the doubt here until there's more evidence of malice. B

You make a good point and that totally could be Palm's aim, but I'm willing to give Palm the benefit of the doubt here until there's more evidence of malice. Building an API isn't an easy thing to do and sometimes you want to go back and re-do parts of it which break applications. The Pre is a really new device and it did take Apple a year to create an API for the iPhone. Plus, Palm is allowing people to install it on their own (as the article notes). By allowing it to live just not in the App Catalogue, it means that power users can install it and understand that it might break with an OS upgrade and they'll have to reinstall and when Palm finalizes the API, hopefully it will be in the app catalogue. As long as a company allows me to install whatever I want, it doesn't matter so much whether I download it from their App Store or on my own. Sure, the App Store has a lot of benefits, but it isn't the same as how Apple's been killing off stuff. Sure, distribution won't be as good for the developer, but it's still alive.