Swedish developer Aaron Ardiri has published around a gigabyte of Palm OS development material on GitHub, after learning that a small but active community still maintains and improves software for the vintage platform. The files had been sitting in his personal backups for more than 25 years, kept only as a personal record from his time as a Palm OS developer.
The archive contains SDKs, technical documentation, conference presentations, development utilities, examples, and some limited system source code that Palm originally shared with developers. Ardiri had previously posted source code from his own Palm OS apps, but assumed nobody would want to work on them. That changed when a developer submitted a pull request to his Lemmings source repository adding HiRes+ display support for the Palm Tungsten T3.
To avoid copyright problems, Ardiri deliberately left out Palm OS ROM images, firmware, simulators, and commercial apps that he did not have explicit permission to distribute. He frames the release as a historical preservation effort, noting that much early mobile development knowledge has disappeared along with old websites and developer forums.
Ardiri has also handed more than 50 old Palm OS devices to Russian developer and preservationist Dmitry Grinberg. He said the repository is his contribution to keeping a historical record of what development looked like when Palm OS was a thriving commercial platform.