Palm webOS and Pleco

[misterasset]

I could go into a long rant here about supporting the people who gave you your start, pointing out the ridiculous comparison of Pleco on iPhone to Pleco on a Tungsten T5, the obvious reason that developing for more than one platform gives those platforms strength and thus gives developers options for the future, the pointless idea that releasing your product 3 weeks or 3 months after the anouncement makes no difference on the quality of the product, or the idiocy of comparing HP's path forward with Palm's actions of the past... but I think my feelings on these topics are well known at this point.

 

[mikelove]

supporting the people who gave you your start

And subsequently screwed us by thoroughly mismanaging their platform and causing most of the effort we put into getting Pleco 2.0 working on Palm to be wasted, resulting in a delayed release of our iOS app that we continue to be penalized for to this day.

Anyway if anybody "gave us our start" it was Oxford and Motorola, who took a leap of faith in giving us two critical early licenses for our first product: we've actually been having some very friendly discussions with Oxford recently, and our Android version will probably work on a number of Motorola devices.

the obvious reason that developing for more than one platform gives those platforms strength and thus gives developers options for the future

Which is why we're supporting Android, but two platforms are all we can reasonably manage and Android's open-source nature / huge array of manufacturer support makes it a much safer "backup platform" than webOS.

the pointless idea that releasing your product 3 weeks or 3 months after the anouncement makes no difference on the quality of the product

No, but it does increase the likelihood that you actually will release it and that it will mostly match your announcement; it's tough to predict what sort of problems you might encounter in the late stages of development, and numerous tech companies have been burned in the past by demoing in-development products too soon and not being able to deliver on the promise of those demos.

or the idiocy of comparing HP's path forward with Palm's actions of the past

Well why are they entitled to be treated as someone who "gave (us) our start" if they're no longer the same company?

We're more interested in future potential than past actions anyway, and the Nokia-Microsoft partnership pretty much consigns HP to 4th-place status among smartphone OSes. That may still translate to a respectable market share of 5% or so, and attract enough developer support to satisfy a significant number of consumers, but for our purposes, if we can only afford to support two platforms it probably doesn't make sense for webOS to be one of them.