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Really it was just the Palm Pre’s hardware that held it back
I’d argue it was just purely the rat race of “the most apps” where all other vendors lost out to iOS and Android. It didn’t matter that it had all the essential applications, as well as having plenty of the fads/gimmicks of the time (Angry Birds, Pandora, et al) natively supported, it still boiled down to the normie logic of “BUT I WANNA RUN ALL THE APPS!” There was also the whole culture sentiment of “if you make a niche Android/iOS app and sell it, you could become like a millionaire overnight” that people seemed to clamor around, as another gimmick economy (as The Next Big Thing™ after the dot-com bubble).
There was also the tidbit that most of the operating system (outside of Linux kernel and standard utils) was proprietary. It’s only when it was pretty much given up on, that they started to open it up as various open source projects. Comparatively Android was far more open source than webOS at the time.
@arcanicanis@southernwolf@boredsquirrel >There was also the whole culture sentiment of “if you make a niche Android/iOS app and sell it, you could become like a millionaire overnight” that people seemed to clamor around, as another gimmick economy (as The Next Big Thing™ after the dot-com bubble).
Oh I remember this so vividly, this was the mindset among the tech illiterate because they read about Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg and saw they were rich. Or they’d hear a news story about how RANDOM KID GETS RICH FROM MAKING APP without knowing the how and why he did it, just that he can get rich from making an app. They’re like the guys in college I saw taking sysadmin classes thinking that maybe they could make video games or some shit, before all but the shittiest community colleges added gamedev courses.
I also remember during this timeframe that the niche mobile OSes with users would notably attract the same kind of developers as unpopular microcomputers did (Linus Torvalds and his Sinclair QL come to mind): random guys making up for how said platform was being abandoned by the world. Windows Phone 7/8/10 had a lot of these developers who would write third party clients for websites or chat platforms (one of the NZ shooting victims was one such dev) and back in the day everyone pretty much had to use one if they didn’t want to struggle with IE. Some of these types of devs still exist in the tiny KaiOS sphere.
Something else about the Pre I vividly remember was that the Pre was not only carrier locked, but it was carrier locked to one of the CDMA companies. There was unusually no unlocked GSM version for sale in the USA. This was a big sour spot during this timeframe, anyone who remembers this era also remembers the years of Verizon users asking for a CDMA iPhone or Geohot making a name for himself by unlocking a iPhone 2G to work on T-Mobile. This hurt a phone trying to be mass market when you could only buy the big name phone on Sprint of all places.
I’d argue it was just purely the rat race of “the most apps” where all other vendors lost out to iOS and Android. It didn’t matter that it had all the essential applications, as well as having plenty of the fads/gimmicks of the time (Angry Birds, Pandora, et al) natively supported, it still boiled down to the normie logic of “BUT I WANNA RUN ALL THE APPS!” There was also the whole culture sentiment of “if you make a niche Android/iOS app and sell it, you could become like a millionaire overnight” that people seemed to clamor around, as another gimmick economy (as The Next Big Thing™ after the dot-com bubble).
There was also the tidbit that most of the operating system (outside of Linux kernel and standard utils) was proprietary. It’s only when it was pretty much given up on, that they started to open it up as various open source projects. Comparatively Android was far more open source than webOS at the time.
@arcanicanis @southernwolf @boredsquirrel >There was also the whole culture sentiment of “if you make a niche Android/iOS app and sell it, you could become like a millionaire overnight” that people seemed to clamor around, as another gimmick economy (as The Next Big Thing™ after the dot-com bubble).
Oh I remember this so vividly, this was the mindset among the tech illiterate because they read about Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg and saw they were rich. Or they’d hear a news story about how RANDOM KID GETS RICH FROM MAKING APP without knowing the how and why he did it, just that he can get rich from making an app. They’re like the guys in college I saw taking sysadmin classes thinking that maybe they could make video games or some shit, before all but the shittiest community colleges added gamedev courses.
I also remember during this timeframe that the niche mobile OSes with users would notably attract the same kind of developers as unpopular microcomputers did (Linus Torvalds and his Sinclair QL come to mind): random guys making up for how said platform was being abandoned by the world. Windows Phone 7/8/10 had a lot of these developers who would write third party clients for websites or chat platforms (one of the NZ shooting victims was one such dev) and back in the day everyone pretty much had to use one if they didn’t want to struggle with IE. Some of these types of devs still exist in the tiny KaiOS sphere.
Something else about the Pre I vividly remember was that the Pre was not only carrier locked, but it was carrier locked to one of the CDMA companies. There was unusually no unlocked GSM version for sale in the USA. This was a big sour spot during this timeframe, anyone who remembers this era also remembers the years of Verizon users asking for a CDMA iPhone or Geohot making a name for himself by unlocking a iPhone 2G to work on T-Mobile. This hurt a phone trying to be mass market when you could only buy the big name phone on Sprint of all places.