webOS

» see webos.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

webos was unveiled by palm at CES on january 8, 2009. the os was the company's bet that a small post-blackberry handset maker could still win a slice of the smartphone market that iphone had opened up eighteen months earlier. the first device was the palm pre, released on sprint in the united states on june 6, 2009. the hardware was a small slider with a physical keyboard underneath, and the screen ran a card-based interface where each open app sat as a tile you could flick away with a gesture below the display.

hp bought palm for $1.2 billion in april 2010. the strategy at the time was to put webos on a stack of new hardware. tablets, phones, eventually printers and PCs. for about a year hp talked about webos as the universal OS that would compete with apple top to bottom. the hp touchpad shipped on july 1, 2011 with positive technical reviews and almost no sales. forty-eight days later, on august 18, 2011, hp announced it would halt all webos hardware development. the touchpad inventory got fire-saled to $99, where it cleared in days, and the platform was effectively dead as a consumer product within forty-eight hours of the announcement.

i never owned a webos device. by 2009 i was 25, working as a computer engineer in turkey, and the smartphone choice in ankara was already iphone or android. the palm pre never officially launched in turkey at carrier scale, and the touchpad was not sold here either. webos in turkey was a thing you read about on engadget. i remember the touchpad fire sale specifically because the screenshots of $99 tablets passed through every tech feed for about a week, and then the platform stopped being a thing anyone was deciding between.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it died ~

the cause of death was a corporate parent that decided the bet was not worth finishing. hp's leadership changed in september 2010 when leo apotheker took over as ceo, and his strategic priority was enterprise software over consumer hardware. the touchpad's launch numbers came in well below internal projections, and apotheker concluded that hp could not catch ipad and android tablets without spending several more years and a lot more money on the platform. the call to halt webos hardware was made roughly seven weeks after the touchpad shipped.

the open-source pivot followed in december 2011. hp announced webos would be released under an open-source license as "open webos" and that core engineers would keep working on it. that release happened in 2012, but by then no major device maker was looking to adopt a third mobile OS. the open-source release was a way to preserve the engineering work and the patents while giving hp an exit from owning the platform.

lg bought what was left on february 25, 2013. the price was not disclosed publicly. lg moved the OS to its smart television line, where it shipped first on 2014 LG TVs and remains the software running most LG TVs and a few other appliances today. the patents went separately to qualcomm in 2014. so webos as a phone OS died in august 2011, and the brand has lived a second quiet life on living-room hardware ever since.

~ what remains ~

the gesture vocabulary. swipe-up to dismiss an app, swipe-left or right between cards, a small gesture area below the screen reserved for system actions. that was a webos invention in 2009, and every major mobile OS adopted some version of it within five years. ios moved to gesture navigation in 2017 with iphone x. android followed in 2018 with android 9. the cards model itself, where each running app is a stackable tile you can flick away, is now the standard task switcher on both platforms.

the talent diaspora. several of the senior designers and engineers who built webos at palm went on to apple after the shutdown. matias duarte left palm in 2010 to lead the redesign that became android holo and then android material. the playbook those people had run at palm showed up later as the foundation of two of the platforms that ended up winning. webos lost the market and seeded the operating systems that won it.

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