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My path to the Palm App Catalog

Introduction


Finally, I had free time to write something good, good, eternal.

This time, let's continue the conversation about how an ordinary non-American person can get into the mobile application market, and in particular, I will talk about how I managed to register and get the opportunity to place paid Palm WebOS applications in the Palm App Catalog .

Start


It all began a long time ago, or rather, at the beginning of last year, when Palm announced the release of devices with Palm WebOS on board, as well as a program for developers to access early versions of the Palm Mojo SDK , which is used to develop applications for this mobile platforms.
It all looked quite beautiful and rosy, especially in the light of the fact that This platform is new, the possibilities to be the first and write an application that will become popular in the future were almost limitless.

After the announcement of the Palm Mojo SDK Early Access Program, I immediately applied for participation, but during the registration, the comrades from Palm openly stated that yes, registration is available to everyone, but in fact only those whom Palm considers worthy will receive access. It’s not clear what criteria they were guided by, but I managed to get official access to the SDK only after 4 months. All these 4 months (and in fact even less, since the SDK was not available for free download for a long time) had to be content with pirated / unofficial versions, which sometimes, with a delay, appeared on torrents.
In fact, now a similar story is happening with the Samsung Bada. Access to the site is open to developers, but you can’t download the SDK, for this you need your company to become a Samsung partner, and for this they ask for too much extra information, which is infuriatingly infuriating.

And finally, a miracle happened and Palm sent me an invite, it was about this time that the first chapters of the book ( here and here ) were published on webOS development and it was already possible to somehow understand what to do with this miracle .
')

It even works.


Yes, exactly, “it even works” - this is exactly the thought that came to my mind after I first installed the WebOS SDK. Yes, on Vista there were problems with the fact that earlier versions tried to write something to Program Files, and this cannot be done, but with direct hands growing from the right place, all these problems were solved quite simply. And yet, yes, the SDK worked almost the first time.

Development language - JavaScript. I never knew him, and somehow there was no desire to learn (I wrote all my life under the desktop in C ++ and everything else in C ++, all the hands did not reach the interpreted languages). But after all, new horizons, the opportunity to earn good money, fame, world domination ... Eh ... What can you not do for the sake of world domination ... And I did. I sat down to learn javascript.

Always adhered to such a rule that if you want to learn something, teach it to others. This is how tutorials for Palm WebOS began to appear. The first two weeks I set out to produce one tutorial per day. He sat down, dealt with the problem, made an example, then described the impressions. From this venture it came out this , this , this and a few more here .

After the seventh day of training tutorials, I felt the strength to do something useful. I found a person who wanted a mobile application for webOS and wrote the first commercial application - a client for sharing files via SMS for the SMSMyFile service. It took me 15 hours to develop the first version of the first webOS application. Now this application is available in the Palm App Catalog, distributed for free, although the development was worth the money.

I hate you, Palm ... and I love


Then there were attempts to post the application in the Palm App Catalog. For the mobile app sales platform, Palm had the same policy as the SDK. You write a letter to them, send the compiled package with the application in a letter, they consider the possibility of publication and then publish. This was called all eCommerce Beta Program . Now the page with the description of this program on the official site gives the 404th error, therefore I don’t give the link.

It looks simple and I very much hoped that it would also be fast. Palm is a small company, I heard somewhere that there were only 300 people working at that time (maybe this is not true, but still, the company is clearly less than MS), and besides, their mobile market share not so big, so it seemed to me that for every satisfied client or developer they should (they should, should, something like that ...) hold with both hands.

And so, I write a letter, attach to it a description of the application and distribution, and ... nothing. Silence. For the sake of sporting interest I sent a letter with a notice of reading. Two weeks later I received a notification that I did, yes, my letter was read. Silence again. Already thought that everything, lost my application or forgotten, and after! (Attention) for a month and a half I get another notification that ... the letter from someone from Palm was deleted without reading. After that, I was offended. By the way, I was not the only one who was offended. Many people also hate Palm because of their policy of communicating with developers. Then there was a long lull when, having developed my solo, I cannot at least somehow give it to users. Trying to distribute an application for Palm WebOS on your own is a relatively stupid idea. Well, except that if you have a service that already brings millions of profits and some of this money you can spend on promoting your program (but then the question arises, why are you not yet in App Catalog'e :)) .

During this time, I managed to read any useful documentation, such as the UI Design Guidelines , Application Submission Checklist , the knowledge of which then repeatedly helped me in the future.

And then ... Registration in the Palm App Catalog has become public. This could not but rejoice, but other problems came along with joy.

The main problem, oddly enough, became ... money. Much money. For some reason, Palm, besides being clumsy, also turned out to be greedy. Participation in the Palm Developer Program was made possible in three ways:

And Palm takes away from you 30% of each sale;)

In fact, register on the site and download the SDK (you can download it officially only after registration), you can do it for free, but if you decide to distribute your applications, you need to upgrade your account to the developer status and, nevertheless, choose one of three options. I decided in late December. By that time, I had the Android version of SMSMyFile ready, which started selling on the Android Market, and I decided to spend the first profit from sales on registering with the Palm App Catalog.

It was close to a new year, and when I decided to register, they took me not $ 99 but only $ 5 for the first year of participation in the program and with the subsequent renewal for $ 99. I do not know if this discount is still available, I will not try a second time :)

To give money is a simple matter, but after registering, in order to be able to post an application, you had to enter a lot of personal data, including your address and PayPal account.

With my PayPal account, I somehow didn’t work out right away. Ukraine in the list of countries in the account settings was not. I had to write to the support service, from which I waited for a response for two weeks. They advised me to enter the American address and look for the American PayPal (just do it funny, reputable company representatives advise such not entirely honest frauds). Well, I have experience with this. We drive in the address of the bank that issued the Payoneer card as an address, then we indicate the American PayPal.

So what is next? PROFIT? Yes, schaz! This is only the beginning ... before the profit is still very, very long.

But nevertheless, it was enough to post a free application.

In order to post paid applications, it is necessary to specify the American taxpayer code (the address is in the American account) - ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) or EIN (Employer Identification Number), which I, for obvious reasons, did not have.

But, the Internet has it all. And I found a company that offered to register ITIN / EIN for 100 green American presidents. Money paid, tsiferku sent after 4 days. Tsiferka like working, indicated it in Google Checkout , Palm App Catalog , Intel AppUp . Documents confirming the validity of this tsiferki, promised to send within 4 weeks from the date of receipt. At the moment, more than 4 weeks have passed, and there are no documents yet, so I will not give a link to the site offering this service until the circumstances are clarified.

While EIN was registered, I found information on Habré about the AdMob system, which allows placing ads in mobile applications. I decided to insert AdMob in SMSMyFile. For these purposes, there is a normal working SDK for WebOS, it starts with a half-kick. I will tell you more about the integration process, I will tell you in a separate post.

But, judging by the statistics for the month, there is no money there, at least on webOS. At the moment, SMSMyFile has about 10,000 downloads, and this brings benefits to several dozen cents a day. In applications for the iPhone from AdMob a lot more confusing, but something like this later will tell.

The application submission process in the Palm App Catalog is rather dreary, they require a lot of different information. If you have indicated that you want to distribute the application, for example, in Germany, then please kindly specify all the texts in German, do all localization in German. English version does not roll. After you have specified all the information, there will be another review in Palm before publishing.

But there are several points that I would call positive:

Having played enough with the free version, I decided to try how it works with paid applications.

As a paid application, I decided to make a program that saves Web pages as PDF files. Work on it took 14 hours. The program pulls one pretty popular service, which gives PDF on a GET request, so, in fact, the work was reduced only to the UI.

At this place, I think, it is worth noting the following thing:

Initially, on the Palm Developer Program website, I registered with an e-mail, to which I have Ukrainian PayPal bolted. When I tried to pay with US PayPal, I was told that it was some kind of someone else's account, it does not coincide with the e-mail on the site and I need to link it to the account. Snap PayPal costs $ 10. In this place, I desperately struggle with the toad, which I was almost suffocated when I decided to remember how much money I had ditched, in total, for all this :)

Next was the beta release. For 3 days, while users made free beta, I received about 2000 downloads and 4 emails to support with suggestions for new features. For these 3 days, the application received a rating of 5 out of 5, which is very cool.

Then there was a submit version of the paid version, which took into account the wishes of users who wrote to the e-mail with suggestions of new features. It all looked something like that .

Why do I write "I hope you bought"? Palm has some silly statistics accounting system:

Palm system is even stranger. You will receive your money for the sold software “within 60 days after the end of the current month” in order not to be unfounded, here is a link on the subject (see the section Payment).

Somehow like this. The system works, we will wait for payment.

Some statistics



I hope my multibook will benefit someone.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/85630/

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