Apart from LG home televisions, is this improbable survivor of the mobile OS wars of the late 2000s actually in use anywhere else?
After HP wound it down, the main guy behind WebOS, Matias Duarte went on to Android and then implemented Material Design there.
webOS multitasking, and gesture navigation were way ahead of their 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.
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.
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.
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.