In order to boost its market share Palm has announced the launch of its SDK for app developers. It may be recalled that Palm had an access program that was restricted to a few partners for app development.

Developers will need to work on Palm Pre applets. The Palm Pre App Catalog is likely to go online this fall as announced by Palm. The firm hopes to boost sales after the app development takes off. The app developers for both Palm as well as Android platforms are in a Catch 22 situation. Developers resist from developing apps for these platforms since there are less users when compared to the iPhone. And since there are less apps the sales of these phones are less. iPhone circumvented this issue by developing a strong customer base first.

Palm hopes to break this jinx by the Mojo SDK. The SDK is built on web standards (JavaScript, CSS, and HTML) that developers are already familiar with. It does not entail developers learning a new language. However app development for the iPhone is built using Cocoa, which is familiar to Mac developers. This could prove to be an advantage for Palm.

Palm could attract more attention than the Android platform if Palm chooses to license its WebOS software platform to other manufacturers. How things shapeup for Palm, only the days ahead will tell.