WebOS Open Sourced means opportunities

Created on 2018-03-20 17:32

Published on 2018-03-20 20:33

When LG acquired WebOS from HP I was quite skeptical that something interesting can come out from this. WebOS on its own is a powerful platform but it seemed that it did not get the momentum to position itself along Android or ChromeOS at that moment.

The first surprise was WebOS on LG TV sets. The WebOS stack was a huge hit as it offered lots of functionality at a decent speed on a quite restrained hardware. The UI was clean and the HTML + CSS + JS programming model was awesome. It really pushed the development on embedded devices to a new level.

Now LG opened up under an Apache license WebOS (indeed there was another project called OpenWebOS based on the HP source code) and we can see a modular stack that has well integrated components based on Chromium. Maybe EFL libraries from Tizen offer fancier graphics but WebOS offers ease of programming.

The most interesting part of WebOS is its possible ubiquity. It might be able to run on devices ranging from touch and touchless tablets to TV sets, car dashboards to building management, from small devices to virtual machines. It would make quite a nice UI for a fridge or a printer or why not ATM machines. Overall the new platform can improve both the UI and features of products using it as well as reducing the in-house development costs with custom UIs.

Moreover, having a community that sustains the development of this OS would add features quickly in the project and would enable ports on various hardware (I have already seen a port on RPi). A niche for a simple and clean UI is opened in places where a fully fledged OS is too much (Android or something else). Having a web-like programming model without the need for some 3rd party frameworks as Ionic is also a great opportunity as it would make it easier to attract developers on the platform.

This being said, I'm eager to see how WebOs will evolve as I feel it is in a very sweet spot right now.