NaNplayer Rejected From The App Catalog

Posted on 11 September 2009 by Juventino Quinones
Tags: App Catalog, Applications, Home Brew, Palm, Palm Pre

Listening music in our mobile devices has become second nature to most of us. That’s why we were happy when we announced the hombrew music player “NaNplayer” for the Palm Pre as an alternative to the stock music player. After reviewing it, Palm has decided to keep the NaNplayer app out of the App Catalog for now.

NaNdenied

Blubble, its developer, informed yesterday at PreCentral forums that Palm has denied entry into the App Catalog to his NaNplayer. He posted; “I have some bad news folks. Palm has told me that they will not allow my music player NaNplayer into the App Catalog at the current time.” Blubble also said, “I won’t spite the user community just because of Palm’s decision. I will release NaNplayer to the Homebrew gallery once it is done. However, this will still leave most Pre users to get by with a music player that doesn’t even let them create a playlist.” Apparently the issue is that NaNplayer uses an undocumented API to query music files on the device and their metadata.

Since then, Palm’s own Chuq Von Rospach has answer to the community over at Precentral:

We reached out to JC (the developer) and discussed our reasons for not accepting the application at this time, but we also wanted to be open with you about this.

NaNPlayer is using APIs that are currently private because they will change significantly in a future release. Although we aren’t able to support the functionality that JC needs right now, we are listening to the community to help prioritize which APIs and features we put into webOS.

Chuq Von Rospach
Palm Developer Community Manager

Chuq also gave hope to all those who want to see NaNplayer in the App Catalog by saying “While we can’t accept NaNPlayer into the App Catalog right now, we are not rejecting it, and we are happy for it to continue life as a homebrew application until we get to the point where we can release public, supportable APIs for the functionality that it requires.” He also hinted about “more fantastic creative applications” that might be release later down the road “via an expanded set of public APIs.”