Based on chatter and a few people I have spoken to, I think the new Palm OS with regards to third party apps will pick up where Apple left off with web apps. While everyone slammed Apple for initially introducing web apps as the primary mode of 3rd party apps on Mobile devices, the idea has a lot of merit, but Apple botched this idea badly. I think Palm will show the full potential and actually do it the right way.
There are 4 reasons why web apps make sense as 3rd party apps for Palm.
1. Web tools are now sophisticated enough to create apps that match and exceed anything you can do on most native apps. You might think that is a bold statement but really it's not. If the new Palm OS supports the flash player then you can do pretty much anything, including 3D.
2. Relying on Web tools, Palm can go from 0 to a bazillion developers immediately without having to have their own platform. There are already well over a million bona fide Flash developers out there, so if the OS supports Flash and all the other web standards, then you automatically have all those developers with no learning curve, no sdk, with apps ready from day 0.
3. They can provide the necessary hooks to make these apps completely robust. I think this is where Palm can shine, by providing all the necessary apis that allow web apps to communicate with the core of the device’s OS. If you noticed in the first ever presentation of Apple’s web apps for the iPhone, they demonstrated how a web app can access the device's local contact database. This held promise that they would give developers more access( gps info, phone apis, etc ), but it seemed Apple just got consumed by the whole native app movement that they stopped working on this. Palm will exploit this too the fullest. They will also do things like caching and offline mode to further make web apps run more efficiently.
4. The Apple app store proves that web apps are very viable. I estimate that 80% of the apps in the app store should not be native apps. They should be web apps if Apple had just provided additional apis for web apps. All those $.99 apps can all be web apps. Another good example of this is how ESPN and Facebook have approached the iPhone. Facebook, which originally was a web app, has jumped on the native app bandwagon. Well, that app is absolutely not necessary as a native app if Facebook had the right apis. On the other hand, ESPN has stuck with the web version for its website/App, they could have easily created a native app, but even with no Flash, they have used other web tools to create a robust site/app.
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