Palm Discusses Limited Early Access Program

Over a week ago, Palm announced on their Palm Developer Network blog that they had expanded the Early Access Program to double its size.  By today, it's estimated to have doubled in size again.  That's great news, but some developers are still chafing under the relatively small numbers.

So folks are asking questions.  Questions like how many people get invited at a time, and what criteria are used when Palm chooses to invite developers to the program.  Well, Chuq Von Rospach, the Developer Community Manager at Palm, recently respond to these questions and criticisms of the program by saying:

The primary limitation we have today is the capacity of our developer area, which wasn’t built to support the number of developers who want access. That’s actually a good problem to have, and we have a team working on bulking up the infrastructure, too. There are some really interesting things just over the horizon here, but it takes time.

If you think about it, if we let too many people in too fast and everything does the fail whale, we’ll get yelled at and developers will give up on us. I realize that there are some developers who are tired of waiting — and I fully understand — but I hope they’ll come and take another look at us later when we finish the SDK up and get it out to everyone. If we mess up the SDK or the tools, we risk driving away lots of developers and convincing them not to come back. It’s a fun and challenging balancing act.

Our current admission policy is fairly simple: we’re accepting in applications based on how complete and detailed the applications were. I’ve broken that up into a few different piles of applications, and within each pile, we’re admitting them based on when they sent us the application. Right now, the most detailed applications are going in; when we finish that, we’ll grab the next set and do the same until everyone is in the program or we release the SDK to the public and end the early access program.

Let's be honest here, there will still be those who complain at a lack of a public SDK, but Palm has made it clear for a while now that the SDK wouldn't go out until after the device was released.  Things are constantly changing (as noted by changing details found in the O'Reilly book) and it only makes sense for Palm to want to get all their ducks in a row before releasing everything to the public.