Palm's Big Opportunity

Via Macintouch:

"An iPhone app developer's world is lonely...

Three parties are involved: the developers (us), Apple, and the customers. For the most part, Apple stands between us and our customers[...] we can't issue refunds, we can only issue a few promo copies, we can't collect upgrade revenue, we can't respond to App Store reviews, we can't provide installation support, and we can't release updates to address customers' issues in a reasonable amount of time. We can't even tell them when the next update will be available, because we honestly don't know. [...] Our customers, like us, are mostly in the dark with this process, and we can't do much to help them.

For the most part, it's just us and Apple in the room.

And Apple's a brick wall.
"

In large part, Palm has based webOS on open standards. The Palm pre user experience is reported to be very good. Sprint (tethering) and AT&T (rug-yanking over data plans) both stink.

So will Palm be able to draw developers, and customers, to its platform by running a less authoritarian app store than Apple's? Will it even try to do so? Here's hoping...