Palm’s amazingly user-hostile sign-up process | Hacker News Reader

Palm’s amazingly user-hostile sign-up process

quirksmode.org

55 pointsmikecane18 comments

Registration for the developer account to upload free, open-source applications somehow required me to have a Paypal account and a transaction of 0 charged to me.

Reminds me of the time when I wanted to open a capital one bank account. They needed me to deposit 50$ in order to open the account and since they dont have any fees on the account, they said I could use my new ATM card to withdraw the 50$.

Maybe Palm uses the paypal account to make sure your "serious" about developing on the system but I think that mentality is backwards. I dont think a developer would scam the system just so they can be a developer to produce free, open-source applications.

Hopefully, HP changes that too!

Registering for Apple's developer account to upload free, open-source applications to my iphone for testing somehow required me to have a credit card and a transaction of $99 charged to me every year.

And yet people don't seem to complain about that. Go figure.

I agree that that's broken too. But this is not about uploading to the device. It's about uploading to the store and they said it's Free.

Also required were W9 documentation and taxation numbers.

$100 is a great bozo filter, and Apple does the right thing by letting you fiddle with the SDK to your heart's content before paying anything.

$100 is clearly not a great bozo filter, as evidenced by the ream of poor/useless apps in the store.

Also, Apple is not doing the right thing. I bought a phone from them, I have it connected to my computer, and I have the development kit, but running my software on my phone requires me to pay them money.

Well, I look at it like this: If you've got the kind of bullshit we see right now at $100, can you imagine if it were free? You don't have to – look at Android Marketplace:

http://jonathanbuys.com/11-07-2010/Android-Marketplace.html

I'd, personally, prefer a $500 fee to get into the store, but whatever.

On the other bit, I meant doing the right thing relative to Palm's nonsense about grabbing the SDK after jumping through so many hoops. On Apple itself, I've long believed that you should get provisioning for three devices per year for free with an iPhone developer account. Obviously they aren't making money from the fee, so I wonder if there are practical reasons why they don't do this. Perhaps doing all the certificate/code signing/provisioning nonsense on the server would be too costly to just give away.

Registering to place applications in the android market is not free.

Funny, as a HTC user, I don't have that problem.

But lets be serious for a moment here - you knew perfectly well that was the requirement when you brought the phone.

Actually, I didn't. I bought a first-gen iPhone before the App Store was a reality. Now I use a Nexus One and don't suffer from these shenanigans.

No need for snark.

Ok, so you brought it when you couldn't add programs to it at all?

You can download the HP webOS SDK without registering for a developer account. The downloads are linked directly off the tools page. The account is needed to post to the forums, sign up for "Early Access", or to upload apps to the catalog.

When I signed up last year for a WebOS developer account, I was shocked at how much I had to go through. This included giving my company info, EIN, and a declaration of if I was developing for open or closed source apps.

All I wanted was to download the SDK and experiment. Palm should have saved all the corporate declarations for when I actually want to publish an app.

That said, this frustration is the opposite of the experience using the Pre, which I find very well done.

They have a history of this too. I remember trying to sign up for Palm Pilot development, and the form demanded a "DIRECT phone number", I think with the word "DIRECT" actually in caps. They need to understand that developers and customers are supposed to be sizing up Palm at this point in the process and not vice versa.

You don't need an account to download the SDK anymore, just for uploading apps or participating on the developer forums.

This is really amusing in light of the recent wailing and gnashing of teeth on Hacker News at the horrific requirement by Apple that folks plug in their new iPods or iPhones to a computer to get things setup. That setup process looks like even more of a breeze after reading about Palm's.

This part would've bugged me too. That is, if I weren't already bugged by Palm^WHP's habit of pre-announcing products 6-18 months too early, accompanied by the virtual abandonment of currently released technologies -- everything from capable devices not getting 2.0 despite promises, to not fixing bugs in current OS versions with the explanation "fixed in $webos_ver++!".

Great product, poor marketing (premature announcements: shut up and ship! weird commercials that target god knows what demographic), poor management.

In the likely event WebOS fails, it won't be the technology or UX that failed it, it will be the employees around it.

Some WebOS engineers are great (Josh M., etc)

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