While Apple is often credited with being the first tech company to offer an in-house app store to buy software for its mobile gear, that’s not at all true. Other companies had done it before, though not as seamlessly. So I recall working on a client’s Palm Pilot probably before the year 2000. They wanted an app, a game as I recall, so I checked out the source.

I would not be able to recount the steps required or what it cost, but a bare-bones game wasn’t cheap. I was able to make it work, well sort of. After a while, I simply told the client what it could and couldn’t do, and that was it.

Long and short, being able to get apps for any mobile gadget wasn’t a user friendly process. The download and installation schemes appeared to have been cobbled together by developers without serious regard to what the end user would have to confront to get it to load on their gear. Obviously, this didn’t encourage people to buy apps, although the limited functionality often made the attempt frustrating even if you could get it to run properly.

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This article was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2021 at 12:00 AM and is filed under News and tagged with: Apple, Palm, palm pilot.