Swedish developer Aaron Ardiri uploaded roughly one gigabyte of Palm OS development resources to the GitHub repository ardiri/dev-palmos on Thursday. The material had remained in his personal backups for more than 25 years. It contains SDKs and technical documentation. Conference presentations and development utilities are part of the archive too. Examples and limited system source code round it out, once shared with developers studying the operating system's interface and internals.

Ardiri had already published source from some of his Palm OS applications. A pull request that added HiRes+ display support for the Palm Tungsten T3 to his Lemmings repository showed him that people were still improving Palm software. He then found active communities on Reddit and Discord. Other online platforms host similar groups that use the resources to maintain vintage hardware and software.

The archive is a preservation project and carries no blanket open-source permission. Ardiri left out Palm OS ROM images and firmware. Simulators and commercial applications are excluded too, because he lacked explicit permission to distribute them. He said much early mobile-development knowledge disappeared with defunct websites and forums. Documentation archives were lost as well.

Ardiri has also given more than 50 old Palm OS devices to Russian developer and preservationist Dmitry Grinberg. He now views the repository as a historical record of development during Palm OS's commercial heyday.