Not long ago, Palm took the time to announce via the Palm Developer Network Blog that they have doubled the size of the Limited Early Access Program. Now it is estimated that it has again doubled in size with the possibility of more room to grow. Developer Community Manager at Palm, Chuq Von Rospach, has responded to many questions that developers have about the program saying:

The primary limitation we have today is the capacity of our developer area, which wasn’t built to support the number of developers who want access. That’s actually a good problem to have, and we have a team working on bulking up the infrastructure, too. There are some really interesting things just over the horizon here, but it takes time.

If you think about it, if we let too many people in too fast and everything does the fail whale, we’ll get yelled at and developers will give up on us. I realize that there are some developers who are tired of waiting — and I fully understand — but I hope they’ll come and take another look at us later when we finish the SDK up and get it out to everyone. If we mess up the SDK or the tools, we risk driving away lots of developers and convincing them not to come back. It’s a fun and challenging balancing act.

Our current admission policy is fairly simple: we’re accepting in applications based on how complete and detailed the applications were. I’ve broken that up into a few different piles of applications, and within each pile, we’re admitting them based on when they sent us the application. Right now, the most detailed applications are going in; when we finish that, we’ll grab the next set and do the same until everyone is in the program or we release the SDK to the public and end the early access program.

Many developers are going to continue to complain about how Palm is handling the release of the public SDK but these days things tend to change all the time. One arguable advantage that Palm currently has over Apple ismore time and a better plan before releasing things such as the SDK to the public. I am just glad we won’t be seeing 40 Bible and 78 lighter apps among other things in the App Catalog.