WebOS OSE 2.10 | Hacker News Reader

WebOS OSE 2.10

webosose.org

145 pointsshiningrock79 comments

I still remember my Palm Pre and the first version of WebOS. I sometimes wonder how much different the phone OS world would look like if Palm didn't choose Spring as their exclusive partner and commit their other fatal mistakes.

Palm's history is a convoluted mess. I use them as a case study when teaching my creativity course. I made an annotated diagram of their rise and fall to show my students...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5fy6wczeh5sugeg/palm_timeline.png?...

I feel HP TouchPad could have deserved the final point, being the last webOS device from the Palm lineage, and also gaining bit of a cult following after the firesale. It would make interesting case study in itself.

> On August 18, 2011, 49 days after the TouchPad was launched in the United States, HP announced that it would discontinue all current devices running webOS. Remaining TouchPad stock received substantial price reductions, and quickly sold out

There were some really cool design/UI ideas in the works for webOS on tablets. Shame it never came to fruition https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/2/5264580/the-lost-secrets-o...

As the article mistakes... Web OS was the classic example of a skunk works project. A very small amount of people working in near isolation, and answerable only to senior managers.

To any company in trouble, and in need of innovation, this is the perfect strategy. Inevitable Wikipedia link...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

The mochi designs look like what iOS and Android started toward a half decade later.

The designs exist on GitHub somewhere. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to implement them as a front end design language?

Yes I remember this. If I ever taught the course again I would add it. Perhaps also correct the typos :)

Jeffrey Hawkins, the inventor of the palm, has a bit of a cult following almost designers. Far more respected that Johny ‘Dieter Rams’ Ives. His prototyping process was unique. (Now widely copied). Check out his wooden (!) Palm prototypes...

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...

That's a great summary and refresher, thank you.

The HP Touchpad Wiki links to this lengthy article on the history of WebOS under Palm, and it's fall under Leo Apotheker.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insi...

I think the rot set in the moment they partners with larger companies in order to make their products. Nowadays, with Kickstarter and cheap Chinese manufacturing, they could have gone it alone, and not have had to compromise on their vision.

WebOS was the intersection of Android's hack-ability and iOS's usability (in fact, I would say that when it came to user customization it far surpassed Android with Preware)

We'd all be much better off today if they hadn't had made those fatal errors

Actually iOS is an evolution of PalmOS/WebOS user interface paradigm. iOS would have a much harder time to win usability awards if Palm was still around.

WebOS introduced the concept of cards for multitasking, and that you could swipe a card away to close the app. This is exactly his iOS implements multitasking today.

I also remember the really natural way that Palm let you ignore an phone call by placing the phone face down to silence a call you didn’t want to pick up.

Also the initial home screen paradigm is completely same as PalmOS, sans the categories.

Heck, even the notification screen and widgets screen is an evolution of the Today.prc from PalmOS days.

I need to play with my LifeDrive more. I miss that beast.

Also, Graffiti was the best on-screen ink implementation. Change my mind. :D

Fun fact: Palm's latest phone copies iWatch's user interface to a phone interface and makes it usable on a bigger device, it's both fun and awesome in so many levels if you ask me.

I can't remember exactly in what order UX concepts of Maemo/WebOS/Meego came in, but they all had the concept of cards, implemented slightly differently (eg. Nokia N9 and Pre 3 were both released-into-void in 2011 :)). It's amazing that such great products basically never got released (Nokia just sold-off the mobile division to Microsoft, and Pre 3, with Palm already owned by HP, was scrapped days before release).

I loved my Palm Pre 3 gotten off eBay (though I had to hack it to enable Serbian 3G connection, and I put together a Serbian Cyrillic keyboard layout too :): cards and swiping on the home button when editing text (to go left or right by a character or two) were monumental for me. Along with the full keyboard, the first (and last) time I didn't hate typing on a phone :D

Edit: it was probably 3G and not LTE at the time :)

Apple also took about a decade to clone Palm's induction charger with magnetic alignment gadget.

A shame the first Pre was just unusably slow. Innovator's curse, as usual.

That was their own fault. No ndk when Qt literally shipped on the device. In addition, the QtWebkit and v8 versions were woefully out of date being slower and using more memory than necessary. They also seemingly didn’t optimize their Linux kernel or boot sequence either.

I think some of the problems could be traced to performance and power profile of TI OMAP. It was underclocked AFAIK. Probably due to too much heat or power or both.

It was a widespread delusion. The original iphone didn't support native third party apps until iOS 2. For whatever reason, a bunch of people thought that web-only was the future for mobile.

Nokia had flip over to silence thing in Sirocco/Vertu phones for long time

Going back even further, landline phones had a mechanical design that worked the same way, where you put down the phone part you held into the phone-part that was connected to the line ("screen down" into it) and the call would hang up.

iOS still turns cards view into a visual task killer instead of making it front and center. They also don’t have the powerful and useful card groups.

> WebOS was the intersection of Android's hack-ability and iOS's usability

It may have been... I can tell you that in current LG TVs usability is poor. I'm not sure about hack-ability in TVs, this may not apply

lg web os is a nightmare, i wish i had read up on it before i bought the last lg tv. laggy and missing so many apps. ended up buying a cheap android streaming box as the webos is cluttered with so much crap I won't use but missing things I use on other tvs

I explicitly bought a LG TV with Web OS, because having some Android dev experience I don't want to put myself to Android TV.

can I ask what put you off it? I mainly go with android for the apps and sideloading I can't sideload on the LG webos tv I have but can on all three android tvs. media streaming apps on LG webos feel very poorly optimised with the amount of "restarting to recover memory" I get watching youtube/amazon/netflix/stan/etc. even after cleaning cache/reinstalling/resetting/factory resetting the device it happens within 48 hours. most of the useful apps i have on the android tvs are not ported and if they are considering it they seem to be so far down the list of priorities for the devs, they may as well say no. PS, i don't have any love for android and if i am using webos wrong or missing something obvious i would love to know

For me Android is just another OS, I don't really care for its FOSS roots.

Android TV is always catching up with Android versions, for several times its future seemed to follow the same footsteps as Brillo, Android Things, ADK, Tango, Sphere, Daydream, Sceneform, wearOS,....

And then there is the whole update story which is even more catastrophic than on phones.

So if I had to buy a smart TV, at least one from the vendor that owns the OS.

Someone at Nokia once said iOS is like a house with all the doors facing outside. You have to go outside to get from your bed to the bathroom or kitchen or wherever else.

Today, iOS and Android fundamentally use the same, inferior system with the app switcher being more like ctrl-alt-del on your windows machine (you can switch processes that way, but it’s not convenient).

The “revolution” of webOS is how it decided NOT to change everything. It worked just like OSX did.

Users tend to use the same half dozen programs constantly. They pin these to the dock. You’d open your app folder or start menu to see the rest. Same with webOS.

Once they’re open, the default is to switch between them either by clicking windows or using exposé. WebOS Home Screen was also the windows swapper rather than an afterthought visual task manager. WebOS even had card groups that came very close to OS X spaces or KDE Activities.

Your settings were a menu on the right. Just like OS X and you’re app menu was the upper left just like OS X.

If Steve Jobs had seen the webOS UI, I’m completely certain the iOS UI would never have existed.

The big issue that killed them was execution. The pre sucked. A phone without the physical keyboard would have done wonders at launch. Att our Verizon would have done wonders. Not having creepy ads would have sold units too.

On the software side, minor tweaks to Linux would reduce boot time from two minutes to 30 seconds (bigger tweaks could probably have gone even farther with only one piece of hardware). They apparently just didn’t have the experienced devs.

Likewise, at the point where the web was having its biggest growth spurt, they weren’t keeping up. They used a WebKit version and v8 version a year or two behind. Simply updating these two would have almost doubled performance while reducing memory problems.

Finally, they built the core UI on Qt, but didn’t make it available to developers. They had a great, cross platform kit that could have gotten a lot of companies on board, but they didn’t run with it.

I’d love for someone who was there at the time to explain what happened to cause so many simultaneous failures.

On the Nokia side, I still miss my Nokia C7, it was already on the good path with Belle, even Symbian C++ was getting bareable.

Regarding not making Qt available to developers on WebOS, that is still the way on LG TVs, store apps are only allowed to use the JS stack.

> Not having creepy ads would have sold units too.

Wow I totally forgot about those creepy commercials. Those were really bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9aPp2ldO_k

You must mean Sprint. I had one as well, amazing phone just wish the build quality was better.

FWIW, iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US for the first few years.

webOS (which is powered by webOS OSE, like Android and AOSP) is installed on all LG smart TVs these days. LG released webOS 6.0 in 2021.

LG's webOS 6.0 Smart TV Platform Designed For How Viewers Consume Content Today. https://www.lgnewsroom.com/2021/01/lgs-webos-6-0-smart-tv-pl...

LG is #2 TV maker. Global TV market share is 30% Samsung, 15% LG, etc.

And unlike other smartTVs that mostly either run bloated, insecure Android or their own laggy or featureless custom OS's WebOS on LG TVs is fantastic, I've had two over the past 4 years and both are excellent to use, get frequent updates, have advanced features and don't lag at all.

I can't compare to other vendors, but just on it's own webOS in my LG TV got only one "half" update (3.0 to 3.5 I think) and is essentially abandoned. E.g. web browser was working with constant warnings right from the start and now it's not working at all. WebOS probably was intended to be fast but on LG hardware it is crawling slow and apps are often crashing (and it a pain in the ass to reopen what you were watching before crash). And that's on a 1000-1500$ device (when new). Personally I would stay away from LG TVs in future. Maybe others are just as bad, but I see for myself first.

Interesting - WebOS 3.x is pretty old now, until recently I had an old early 2016 model that had WebOS 3.5 or 4.0 (I forget which) on it and it seemed fine, I've never tried using a browser on any of my TVs though so maybe that wouldn't have been a good experience for me either.

I can vouch for the same experience, quite happy so far.

WebOS UX is terrible in LG TVs. It is really hard to do simple things. Try to switch between satellite and TV with less than 5 button presses

Maybe this depends on what model you have, but on my LG TV you can long-press the number buttons on the remote and it creates a shortcut to the current selected input. Long press the same button again from anywhere, and you are taken there. Super nice to quickly open your favorite app.

I honestly think the LG interface is excellent.

Long press is not discoverable.

Maybe it is your model? On mine I press input button, I get a list of options, sorted by if the connected device is on or not, and select. so for me is usually, input button, one touch left, center button. I can also press the input button more times that does the same as the right button

I find it excellent on my C9 and my older early 2016 model (both are pretty much the same).

Xiaomi comes with essentially plain Android TV and just adds an extra home screen that is even simpler than the normal one. Can’t complain there.

Samsung TVs with Tizen are pretty good too in my experience.

Like, seriously? I've had a Tizen TV for almost a year now and every minute of using it I'm cursing myself for not buying an LG (the bezels were slightly thinner on the Samsung and I figured Tizen couldn't be too bad).

It's a complete disaster! The menu system is infinitely worse than even Sony's dumb TVs, which is saying something, becase Sony can't make software for shit.

A short list: - auto-brightnes does literally nothing - changing the brightness manually requires to you go 6 levels deep into the menu - the bottom quick settings bar thing has a bunch of stuff hidden in an invisible tile that shows up only after you try to navigate over the edge, which is the most undiscoberable crap ever - the quick settings contain exactly two settings anyone would care about, the rest are useless and obviously non-comfigurable - can't hide the giant cursor when screen mirroring - can't set a default app to launch into so it takes 4 clicks and half a minute to turn on the TV (we have an app instead of a cable box because wasn't the kind od the point of smart TVs??) - can't install apps without a Samsung account, can't remote control it from a phone without a samsung account - the phone remote control can't enter text!!!!! You have to use direction keys and a shitty on-screen keyboard - no always-on cast receiver - DLNA randomly disappeares, can play like 4 codecs. Half of those you can't even scrub in and the colors get weirdly hue-shifted when playing HDR video (despite the TV supposedly being HDR10, I believe)

This is as much as I care to type on my phone, but I'm sure if I asked someone in my family who actually still uses the thing, I'd get another 10 lines to add at least.

From a developer's point of view there's still a shitload of information missing.

- Which platforms are supported? Is the only platform supported a Raspberry Pi 4?

- what about feature matrix with e.g. camera, gps, gyroscope, touchscreen, etc?

- where is the open source code for what? If I want to fix a driver error, what's the projects/repos relevant to it?

- why are there no official build images that are ready to tryout? (e.g. similar to lineageos's devices list)

- flashing guide is misleading. You cannot "flash" an sdcard. Flashing implies bootloader-like patching of the existing OS of a target device, not a copied image that I can run on the exact same host device.

It took me a while to find the the examples in the repo on github:

https://github.com/webosose/samples

It sounds like you're expecting this to be an alternative Smartphone OS you can flash onto a existing smartphone. While for sure it CAN be one if some people get behind it, I didn't read anywhere that this is a main goal of this open-source project...

For Smartphones, LuneOS carries on the legacy of webOS. I made a video about it running on the PinePhone a while back: https://linmob.net/videos/#LuneOS

Is it possible to replace the firmware on LG or other smart TVs with this?

Is there an OSS alternate smart-TV firmware community?

Yes, there is SamyGO, which is dedicated to Samsung TVs. https://wiki.samygo.tv/

There are custom firmwares, rooting methods, compatibility tables, etc.

There are forums where people root and hack on their TVs. I just saw a zero-click exploit for webos fly by my Twitter feed yesterday.

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/rootmy-tv-coming-soon-dev...

Thanks for that info, that's really interesting!

I made sure to turn off auto-updates on my C9, and when the warrenty expires there's hopefully some really cool things for me to try!

Ironically LG is getting out of the smartphone business now too.

If only someone at LG thought, gee maybe we can make better phones and distinguish ourselves in the market and, oh yeah, we have that awesome WebOS we can use too.

I honestly think it wouldn't have worked. webOS is great (Tizen is great too), but smartphone OS (unlike TV OS) needs developer adoption. webOS didn't try, but Tizen tried, pretty hard (okay, they could have done it better, but oh they tried), and completely failed.

To be fair Bada wasn't any relevant on its attempt to steer developers away from Symbian.

Also the multiple Tizen SDK reboots did not help to gain confidence.

Finally, what use to me is an OS I can't buy in Europe?

I think it would have. Native web stack for app development means there is already a market of millions of devs.

Didn't work for Palm or HP and people complained like crazy about how there "wasn't even a native app framework" and "the apps are just web pages."

I loved WebOS and had all the Palm WebOS phones, but things quickly became a two horse race. I only grudgingly switched after I came to work at Google and they gave us a free Nexus phone as a christmas present one year, and even then I missed my Palm. Android did at least improve once Google hired Mattias Duarte from Palm/HP and he took over UX on it.

I suspect for WebOS to have a decent crack at it they would have eventually had to roll out an Android emulation layer. Developers have a tough enough time supporting iOS and Android.

Apart from LG home televisions, is this improbable survivor of the mobile OS wars of the late 2000s actually in use anywhere else?

Such a shame it didn't survive in the mobile space. I still have a HP Touchpad. WebOS was a really good mobile OS.

After HP wound it down, the main guy behind WebOS, Matias Duarte went on to Android and then implemented Material Design there.

The HP Touchpad was such a joy to use. WebOS was really smooth and significantly more responsive than Android tablets at the time.

One specific feature I miss is when switching apps, the app cards were live views of the app, rather than screenshots like in Android.

It took a decade for apple to bring synergy to iOS, and it was live when the touchpad launched and also simultaneously died :(

webOS multitasking, and gesture navigation were way ahead of their time.

I had the touchpad as well and the OS design was incredible. They were doing things with WebOS that Apple and the like would imitate nearly half a decade later.

MeeGo survives in the form of Sailfish OS, doesn't it?

Not to mention Maemo, Moblin, Mer, etc. - for whatever reason, that project somehow became a zombie Voltron of other failed Linux mobile OS's, and involved big names: the Linux Foundation, Intel, Nokia, and all of these other companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo#Companies_supporting_the...).

It then got replaced by Tizen, which is a similar improbable survivor that was once backed by a bunch of big names and now lives on mostly in Samsung smartwatches.

Maybe it's proof that too many chefs spoil the broth. At least webOS now only has LG to look after it, rather than some sort of Linux-HP/Palm-LG consortium or whatever.

Tizen is about to be phased out of Samsung smartwatches. It's a bit unfortunate since battery life and a lot of other things are quite nice, but Samsung is really really really really bad at making developer friendly anything and pushing an open source firmware outside of their own borders which resulted in abysmal adoption and its ultimate demise.

Keep in mind that HP did the same with webOS, Sun with OpenSolaris etc. So, its not exclusive to Samsung, but rather big enterprise not understanding the outside world.

I actually blame apple. Essentially every one of those manufacturers wanted to replicate apples success in creating a walled garden instead of taking a different open approach. Essentially lack of visionary thinking.

As you said Samsung is terrible at DevRel, but Tizen OS itself is now pretty good. Tizen's survival in medium term is assured since it ships in Samsung TVs.

On the other hand, I am not sure even stellar DevRel would have saved Tizen. Yes, Sun was terrible with OpenSolaris, but wasn't Joyent stellar with SmartOS (which is the same codebase)? That didn't make SmartOS very successful.

They haven't learned the OS/2 lesson, making SmartOS great to run Linux based software doesn't make software shops go crazy to write with Solaris APIs.

You are wrong about Tizen. All new Samsung TVs ship with Tizen.

As far as I know, it's only used for LG TVs, but that's an enormous market. LG TV's market share is 15%, global #2.

LG also has a special webos variant for signage displays (I developed for it at my last job).

WebOS on LG is the reason I bought a Sony Bravia instead. I gave WebOS a try but Android TV is way better and easier to use. Also none of the apps I use for watching anime are available on WebOS (ADN, Crunchyroll, Wakanim). I can't trust that the apps that the apps for services that will exist in the future will be available on WebOS, unlike Android TV.

This seems to be a bag of a lot of different projects across the entire stack.

What part would be the most interesting one? I.e. the one that's actually proposing an OS based on a browser?

You want to look at Enact, an app development framework based on React, and its webOS support. https://enactjs.com/docs/developer-guide/webos/

I'd love to switch to WebOS OSE for a 2-in-1 laptop I'm letting my kid use (it's a fanless Intel core m3 laptop with detachable keyboard).

While this web site seems targeted at someone trying to build IoT products from WebOS, I wonder if anyone has already done some work to write down what steps are needed to get WebOS-the-environment running on any modern GNU/Linux base (eg. Ubuntu or Debian)?

Does this fix the security problem that was revealed a day or so ago?

Apparently referring to this: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/rootmy-tv-coming-soon-dev...

Which seems to mean that current unpatched LG TVs should be rootable for modding.

That would be awesome!

Honestly, webOS is not a bad platform, and developing for it is not even a terrible experience (you basically build a website plus a thin shim to make it appear as an "app"); what holds it back is just the braindead commercial mismanagement from LG - I had massive flashbacks from the Nokia/Maemo years, when looking into webOS app development.

Simple example: you can enable "Dev mode" to install your own apps into a tv, but it disables itself after two weeks or so, deleting all such apps. Why? Because fuck you, that's why! You have to talk to LG to get a "proper" app done, and that means submitting a presentation (I kid you not) to prove the app is "important" enough to warrant inclusion in their distribution channels. Despite all this, 99% of the apps they include are low-quality - the discriminating factor ends up being the willingness to deal with bureaucracy.

If LG fixed their app-development practices, they could easily turn webOS into "the Linux tv", onboarding tons of developers for free.

Is there some sort of demo we can view to play around with WebOS and try it out? As in, some JS implementation?

You can run WebOS in VirtualBox: https://www.webosose.org/docs/tools/sdk/emulator/virtualbox-...

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