Palm has provided a clue as to its long-term plans for native apps through a job listing unearthed today. The smartphone developer is looking for a Game Frameworks Engineer for webOS that would be familiar with hardware 3D acceleration, including modern graphics technology like programmable pixel shaders for advanced effects. Currently, webOS only supports its namesake web code and, while it has certain direct access to the hardware, has been limited to visually simple apps as a result.

The discovery partly corroborates statements made to Electronista by Palm representatives at CTIA. While they didn't provide details, they stressed that the limitations of webOS weren't set in stone and that native code is entirely possible in the long term.

An absence of truly native, game-capable code has been considered a limit on the success of the Pre, which has continued to sell modestly well but compared to the iPhone has been hampered by the absence of apps and games in particular, which make up one of the larger categories in the App Store. It recently opened its SDK to all developers in a bid to swell its software catalog. [via PreCentral]