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Comment by co_pl_te | Hacker News Reader

The GitHub repository is at https://github.com/openwebos/ for anyone who is interested.

I'm tentatively excited by this. webOS was my 'first love' in modern mobile operating systems. Though it lacked the polish of iOS and was limited by the hardware both Palm and HP chose to pair with it, it was ahead of its time in many respects.

Just think, before the original Droid launched on Verizon, webOS had more marketshare and mindshare than Android. Imagine what could have been.

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I like the approaches of both webOS and Firefox Mobile OS. For sure Javascript might not be the language one would choose to start with if one was re envisioning the web today with all the last decades learnings. And perhaps a fresh start could see lots of the incidental and accidental complexity dropped from CSS and HTML. But they are what we have today, and perhaps in time Javascript can align itself more closely to Scheme and a WebCPU element can come along to allow near native code where needed.

I have difficulty seeing a strategy underlying Google's effort with Java/Android - I dont see where it fits for a web company. The App / App Store centric distribution model is a step away from open exchange of information, and the whole App updating model seems very pre- web. Building up yet another Java ecosystem for UI seems another miss step like the original MIDP/J2ME disaster - what is it with Java encouraging non domain experts to implement libraries and frameworks?. Particularly as the web seems to move farther each day from Java in the browser.

Also iOS is quite uninteresting to me from an application development perspective. It has a very 80's feel to it with hard coded apps encouraging fragile pixel precise layouts. It seems primarily about building a money pump around a closed eco system. Some elements of the system are beautiful executed - the whole CoreAnimation / CALayer giving fluid graphics composition for example. But for the vast majority of throwaway apps the level of effort needed to implement native Apps - which for the most part are a gluing together of OS APIs seems like overkill.

Yes. It seems like you could reuse a lot of work from your web application with something like WebOS.

("It seems" == totally unfounded guesswork).

iOS development seems like more of a temporary stopgap to the eventual rise a great standardized mobile web platform. Well, temporary meaning "probably 4-5 years or so".

Agreed. While I totally understand the reasons for going native, it depresses me to see so many people so enthusiastic about it. We only just got out of an era where you had to recode significant parts of a web site to satisfy all the browers.

We can at last write once and use (almost) anywhere... so now we go straight back to boxed off proprietary solutions.

As cleverjake points out, I was wrong about webOS having more marketshare than Android prior to the Droid's launch on Verizon. In my defense, it did have respectably competitive OS share going into the fall of 2009. ;-)

Looking at AdMob's figures on worldwide mobile OS share for August 2009 (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/09/30/admob-the-iphones-sha...), Android reportedly had 7% global share to 4% for webOS.

US figures from AdMob for the same time frame (http://www.prethinking.com/home/2009/9/30/webos-web-market-s...) also revealed Android had a healthy 13% share to webOS' 9%.

I still think that's mighty impressive (though certainly not more) since the Sprint Pre was the only webOS phone until it hit Bell in Canada late that August. The GSM Pre didn't hit until mid-October right around the debut of the 'Droid Does' campaign on October 17, 2009. The rest is history.

Do you have any reference to the webOs marketshare statement? I don't remember this being true.

You're correct, sir. My fond memories of webOS must have clouded my judgment. :-) I'll be back with figures in a sec.

If those are U.S. numbers it's pretty comparable. Android had been out almost a year by August '09 while WebOS only a few months. Verizon was originally planning to launch the Pre as its premiere smartphone but then got in bed with Google, launched the Droid, and the rest is history. I don't think WebOS would be in Android's position if things had gone differently; the ability to customize Android was always its biggest selling factor... but maybe, just maybe, Verizon customers would have loved their WebOS phones enough to give it a longer life than it had. It was a much better OS than Android at the time. As someone who owned Android 1.0, 1.5, and 1.6 devices I can definitely say that.

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