Palm apparently wants to expand the App Catalog in an extremely aggressive fashion – the following statement has been forwarded to me by various developers who are members of the Early Access team who claim to have found it in the Forums:

We are pleased to announce a limited expansion of access to the Beta Application Catalog for our SDK early access partners. Starting today, you can submit your application for consideration to be included in the Catalog.

Requirements
The Application Catalog is currently beta and does not have e-commerce enabled, so the applications you submit must be distributed for free. During the beta phase, you cannot sell your applications, nor offer subscriptions (however, you may generate revenue from sponsorships or in-application advertising).

For this phase, we will be reviewing applications with preliminary submission guidelines, which include:

How To Submit Your Application
*Send an email to REDACTED@palm.com. In the subject of your email put your name or your company followed by the name of your application. For example:

Subject: XYZ Company – Flap Jack City

or

Subject: Joe Programmer – Social B

*In the email, submit a description of the application. This is not limited to 500 characters as mentioned above. Indicate which webOS services your application integrates with (e.g, location based services, calendar, contacts, notifications/alerts, etc.).
*Send 4-6 screens shots of your application. If you are taking screen shots of your application in the emulator, please crop the image to the dimensions of the emulator window. Any application screen shots or product descriptions you submit will be for our internal use only and will not be shared with any third party.
*If you have multiple applications you would like considered, send a separate email for each application.

What Happens Next
Your submission will be initially screened by members of our engineering and developer marketing teams. We’re looking for apps that show off webOS and offer a superb user experience. If it is selected for further consideration, you will be provided access to our Application Submission tool to upload the application itself and asked to sign an App Catalog License Agreement. After we receive your app, we will do a more detailed review which could result in feedback for things to fix or change. Once we are satisfied with the quality and user experience, your app will be uploaded to the App Catalog.

Status and Feedback
Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide you with status during the review process. What you may receive from us is feedback on your application UI or technical issues should we encounter them. We may also have suggestions for webOS features you should consider implementing to enhance the app.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Even though Palm still hasn’t opened the App Catalog to random submissions, this move definitely is a step in the right direction. Developers now see that their efforts are not in vain, and that they will be given access to the store in the near future. From my personal point of view, this message is one of the best things I have heard from Palm’s for quite some time. If the approvals happen fast and en masse, the boys could resusciate their economy – let’s stay tuned to see how it all plays out!

Related posts:

  1. preWringing – or – the App Catalog does not grow
  2. Palm plans to start selling webOS apps soon
  3. Palm: last call for early access developers
  4. Palm’s App Catalog: (user-) paid apps on the 24th
  5. Palm opens webOS developer program in December