jwz says this in the comments: An important point here is that Palm-the-company used to not be stupid in this way. The way this worked on PalmOS was completely

jwz says this in the comments: An important point here is that Palm-the-company used to not be stupid in this way. The way this worked on PalmOS was completely sane. They went and fucked up their whole process when they switched to WebOS. I assume this is because they hired the majority of the WebOS management team from Apple, pushing out the people who did it right in the PalmOS years, and those new people are idiots. I'm not sure it's safe to assume that this process is stupid. Palm did, indeed, copy all of this straight from Apple's playbook. Apple's App Store is wildly successful. It may have issues from the perspective of some developers, but that's not the only perspective that matters. Palm isn't trying to make a bunch of developers happy. They're trying to sell phones and make users happy. Whether you can make users just as happy without requiring developers to jump through hoops remains to be seen. One could easily argue that it's possible, but I'd like to see evidence of that in the real world. I don't think the software ecosystems for desktop computers are a fair comparison. The ecosystems for older Palm devices, which jwz references here, were never nearly as successful as Apple's App Store. Maybe that suggests that the hoops somehow help the user experience? I don't know. But it looks like Palm is assuming that it does. I agree that this whole process seems completely broken from jwz's perspective, but it's hard to say that Palm had people "who did it right in the PalmOS years" when they never got it right in the category that matters: number of app sales. That could be 100% attributable to the iPhone's superiority, not the App Store's, though.