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Comment by emehrkay | Hacker News Reader

After the "death" of webos, I watched the developers videos and wondered why the whole web community wasnt building apps. The dev tools seemed to be everything that the common web dev wanted.

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The problem was timing. Palm didn't make a webOS SDK generally available until something like two months after the first webOS phone (the Pre) was launched. This meant that they couldn't tap into developer interest during the big pre-launch hype cycle, which in the case of the Pre was massive, thanks to a hugely successful introduction of the device at CES earlier that year (see http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338482,00.asp, http://www.cnet.com/8301-19167_1-10139851-100.html for a sample of the reception it got there).

Then by the time the SDK was available, the Pre had already proven less successful in the marketplace than Palm had hoped it would be, so developer interest had cooled. Nobody wants to write apps for a phone that's a flop.

  The dev tools seemed to be everything that the common web dev wanted.

The dev tools are useless if the platform is a failure. Had HP not prematurely aborted the platform, and a Phonegap port been maintained, then I can hardly see what would have stopped WebOS from being at least modestly successful.

I was digging into webOS development back when the Pre came out and was hoping for a pretty upbeat development community _because_ of the use of web languages. Looking back, however, it felt like webOS (as a mobile OS) seemed too early for its time. The push for more web stuff didn't surface until way after Palm/webOS was deemed toxic to the touch.

It was a pity, but I hope the open source efforts end up redeeming itself. I'm definitely rooting it on and supporting it.

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