I'll show myself out.
It's the same OS, and 99% of people that install Lineage install the GApps otherwise the device is barely usable.
if you're not, you can still use Gapps nano or pico. thats basically just the play store and the service api.
Edit: I see below that it's Android based after all. I still love the way it looks but it's a hard pass. :-(
If you get webOS working on your hardware, you will have a small pile of very staunch supporters.
A couple of realistic caveats, and novel ideas to solve them:
1. webOS is not Android.
Android will eventually mean Fuschia, which will mean bye bye to Linux driver blobs. I'm not sure how the scene looks right now in terms of trying to squash an Android kernel and blobs together with webOS userspace. Might work, might produce rueful laughter.
One interesting thing you could do is lead a community effort to get webOS running on top of Fuschia, which is still very new but functions well enough to fully come up graphically and boot into a Chromium-based session (yep!).
To me, that suggests enough of the Fuschia core is "set" and unlikely to change that RIGHT NOW is the perfect time to quietly catch up to feature parity with alternative userspaces, and when Android does "the big switchover" (it's obvious that's the goal, Fuschia has things like 120fps update targets etc), you'll suddenly have more hardware support than any other platform.
2. webOS has no real apps.
No point denying this is true. Facebook isn't releasing a webOS app. That cements a lot of things. There's also the fact that LG bought webOS for TVs. That did nothing to kill it on phones, but the move certainly did shift all of the tech-prosumer expectancy/focus over to the TV space and leave the webOS-on-phones/tablets sector full of tumbleweeds. And nothing's really changing that.
The webOS-on-Fuschia idea would be unlikely to trigger wholesale adoption of the platform. Not going to do it.
I see a couple of alternatives:
0. You kind of get dual-boot for free anyway
1. Implement hardware-accelerated KVM for ARM on Fuschia, and run Android in a VM
2. Implement kernel-level containerization/virtualization aka what's described under "Virtualization" in http://kernelthread.com/projects/
3. Figure out how Fuschia works at the kernel level and work out how to run the webOS and Android userspaces side by side, either running simultaneously or stopping one to launch the other
(I don't typically start lists at 0, but that first point felt so obvious I used a 0 so I could include it in the list.)
You get 0 for free, and dual booting will appeal to some who want the closure of "Android is simply not running".
1 is... I included that one for comparison :)
2 and 3 seem interesting. I'd tackle these by seeing how the Fuschia team react to being engaged "from the outside". You could lead that effort; I don't think anything is being done in that regard at this point (eg unlike how Chromium does get lots of external contributions from individuals).
Well, that's my 2c anyway.
I really like the display. I've been waiting for a phone with minimalistic display to save battery ever since the Motofone F3.
But there's way too little information there to convince me to pre-order.