Comment by Brian_K_White
16 hours ago
I miss the whole Palm ecosystem.
I have noted many times that I had a slab phone with full screen color icon grid general purpose os with internet and countless 3rd party apps for every conceivable purpose,... 7 full years before the iphone. 8 years before the iphone had 3rd party apps.
And it wasn't Android it was a Samsung SPH-i300 running PalmOS.
It was great that there was not really much of an app store, you got apps individually more or less like desktop os apps. There might have been app stores that collected apps but I don't remember ever using any.
I had apps for everything the same as today. Even though the screen was only like 160x240 and the internet was 14.4k, I had browser & email of course, but also ssh, irc, I even had a vnc client! Audible.com player, countless random things like a netmask calculator, resistor color code app, a few different generic db apps where you design your own fields and input/display screens etc. 3rd party phone dialer that integrated the contacts db. I must be forgetting a hundred other things.
The OS wasn't open source but at least the apps could be, so pretty much like windows & mac.
All in all I'd prefer Android where the entire system is open, except Google has somehow managed to make the real world life with Android less open than PalmOS was, even though PalmOS wasn't open source and I think even the development system wasn't free either.
I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.
> I think even the development system wasn't free either.
Metrowerks CodeWarrior was the original development system for PalmOS and was indeed not free (in either sense).
However a bunch of enthusiasts cobbled together some free development tools: the main parts were adapting the GCC and binutils m68k targets to PalmOS's constrained PIC runtime environment (it was constrained even by m68k standards); a tool to convert the resulting COFF or ELF executable to PalmOS's .prc database format; and a text-based resource compiler for generating UI elements using its own home-grown description language to express what CodeWarrior users were using a graphical UI editor to make.
That mostly still exists as it was back in the PalmOS days at <https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net>. And if you hunt around on GitHub you'll find a few people who've kept the code compiling with stricter more modern compilers.
(And see also <https://pilrc.sourceforge.net> for the resource compiler.)
> I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.
I don't think this in itself is the cause. Basically every Linux distribution has an "official repository" which is really just an app store by another name, but the system is still open. Having an integrated distribution channel is really useful!
True. And of course there is no problem with other stores like fdroid.
But somehow google play is different, which is why I added the highly integrated part.
I think fdroid actually helps google play by going so far the other direction that it excludes most apps, so you cannot have fdroid as your only app store. (to be clear I highly approve of fdroids policy and would not change it)
But there are even other app stores that cover both bases, allowing all the non free apos from play store and yet not being google. But then the problem is trust. I trust the apps in say the ubuntu repos and in fdroid, but say Aurora store? ehh, maybe? I would normally not even slightly consider installing apks from a 3rd party like that, but I got an eink tablet that can't install google play, so was more or less forced to try it just on that device. But that's not my phone. I don't have or do anything important or sensitive on it.
So while I am still sure that Google is doing multiple things that keep play store practically unavoidable necessity, it's probably also a combination of other, kind of coincidental factors too like fdroids strict principles and no obvious basis to trust any other store. Maybe some of those other factors are not immutable.
Maybe it's just an impression thing or a failure of marketing and Aurora is exactly the answer and exactly as trustworthy as any official major linux distro repo, and I just don't have that impression for some reason.
I worked for a company that published a PalmOS app. Palmgear.com was a very important distribution channel, but so was our own website, I forget the exact ratios.