Bad developer experience might have contributed but I think the primary cause was the same as what killed Windows Mobile and Symbian: The iPhone reset the bar for user experience and at the same time Apple changed handset + app distribution models, Palm failed to meet the situation. Google figured it out, scrapped the Android UX, and managed to be #2. With the high per-platform cost of mobile dev there's apparently not room for more than two so even Microsoft couldn't catch up.
PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched.
In fact most players had divested the market at this stage. The PocketPC team was a skeleton and Symbian was being eaten from inside by competing internal projects.
>PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched.
It was declining but not dead. Palm's swan song, Palm Centro, released in 2007, was a big success. They sold at least 2 million units[1]. According to AdMob, in terms of web traffic, at some point it was the second most popular smartphone in the US (7th worldwide)[2].
Exactly, good brand and decent market position making the situation potentially salvageable with better strategy. Look at Apple around ten years earlier, classic MacOS and the beige boxes and a business bleeding cash. Palm has the Pre on the way, that was a really nice device but delivered too late and without a good enough app strategy.
