UPDATE: New public ftp replaces box account access! See below.

I mentioned in an earlier article on pivotCE that I won’t judge how people get their webOS apps these days. I really meant it.

To share or not to share

I’ve been wondering how to do this for a while now. Most of us just share the apps we have any way we can. PMs on here, dropbox, box, or personal server links but dear LORD is that time consuming and counter-productive.

You may remember the pivotCE Takeout. It was a way to enter your device information and pull down apps from the catalog. webOS friend and webOS Ports team member, Herrie, invented a similar way to do so with a modified version of Impostah from webOS Internals. But surprise, not everyone did this just for their own apps. Some also downloaded the entire catalog of free apps for multiple regions and webOS versions.

How many webOS apps were there really? Hard to say for sure but tens of thousands seems to be about right. I have amassed a large collection of apps from those who pulled down the catalog and about 500 from other sources. My total is over 5000 6000. I do not have a database of info that explains what each is though. Some of that data exists but it’s not organized. You can download the list of apps on the forum thread for this topic.

The apps are on my Box account but I won’t post the link here. It is also in the thread on the forums. Just a note, over 90% of the apps I have were free in the app catalog.

Get the apps via the new public FTP.

Abandonware

Make no mistake, webOS apps are abandonware. Many schools of thought exist on the topic of piracy and copyright infringement in regards to abandonware. I’ll be honest, I don’t care. Feel free to read up on it and develop your own opinions.

To me it’s about preserving what we love. We’ve been working very hard to do things properly by sending emails to devs and companies. Some of our efforts have worked. Some developers say they don’t support the apps anymore (ie. don’t care about it). But almost all have ignored inquiries.

So we tried. And now we share. We share to preserve that which we love and that’s the most important point of all.

More to come

You may have seen my tweet on Twitter if you follow me.

Turns out everyone was waiting for someone to be the first to share #webOS apps. Exciting things are being shared soon. More to come…

— Alan Morford (@alan_morford) December 28, 2015

If it’s a doctor, app, or other webOS related file, it may be shared with you very soon. For instance, have you seen palm.si? It’s been there for a long time as a mirror of the old Palm site. I would bookmark that site if I were you.

You can help

What I would like to see is community interaction. I can provide the ability to upload more apps and/or provide my services to create webOS version folders etc. I would absolutely like ideas on how to organize. One idea was to start a Google doc spreadsheet with name, latest version number, webOS version number, file name, (etc.) that the community could edit.

Take a look at your backed up apps and compare it to the list I linked above. Find something you have that I don’t? Send me a note in a PM on the forums or in DM on Twitter.

#webosforever