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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I’ll pretend to be a VC. So you make a WebOS game/app. What kind of users do you expect to have? A whole bunch of cheapos who bought the tablet because it was $99. And how much do you think those people will pay for your app?

Next question. Word of mouth. If those people like your app, they’ll tell friends. Will those friends have WebOS tablets?

Let’s talk about the lifetime value of your code base. How long can we expect to make sales of your app? After we have saturated the market of existing Touchpads, will there ever be another piece of hardware running WebOS to sell to new customers who might buy your app?

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Right now, I’d say this is a cherry-picking exercise. If you can port an existing app to WebOS and make money on a short-term basis over and above your porting costs, fine. Otherwise... Android and iOS are the two front-runners with Windows-Phone-whatchamacallit a distant third.

IMHO.

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Anecdotally, webOS devs, given the low threshold of competition and influx of new Touchpad owners, are doing pretty fantastic sales right now. Good for a quick return at least. Since HP's also being charitable and giving away 6-packs of apps for free (and paying the dev for each one at full regular 70% share), a couple of those devs picked found themselves 5-figures richer overnight. No idea how long they intend to keep doing it, but it seems ongoing for now.

Good platform for quick wins. Mid-term and longer, it'll largely depend on whether webOS finds new hardware with which to keep it alive.

I think that's the key; new hardware. If HP relies on the TouchPad for any more than 6 months, a year tops, they'll completely lose out on all their efforts. They need someone else to make better and still cheap hardware to keep people interested and buying. There are simply too many Android devices coming out, each one better than the last (forcing a price reduction of the last), to ride their current wave for any longer than that.

It's still very curious why they called an end to the hardware production BEFORE they had someone lined up to make new devices though.

Having just bought one of these, I'd say that I'm more likely to pay for apps as there is a short selection. For instance, on Android I wouldn't pay for Tweetdeck or similar, but on the touch pad I would, as there isn't many options.

You're right, but I don't think OP is alone in thinking they way he does. Creating an app in pure HTML/CSS/JS and having it actaully run quickly is an interesting idea, and one that makes WebOS unique. The problem before was that there was almost nobody using the OS, but that's changed a bit now. Is it worth doing? Time will tell, but if you can bang out something quickly and not spend a lot of time/money getting it done, it might be worth a shot now.

Yeah that's pretty much what I was thinking. I'm one of the cheapos that have the TP now and would definitely pay for apps if there was something worth paying for.

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