Such a shame it didn't survive in the mobile space. I still have a HP Touchpad. WebOS was a really good mobile OS.

After HP wound it down, the main guy behind WebOS, Matias Duarte went on to Android and then implemented Material Design there.

The HP Touchpad was such a joy to use. WebOS was really smooth and significantly more responsive than Android tablets at the time.

One specific feature I miss is when switching apps, the app cards were live views of the app, rather than screenshots like in Android.

It took a decade for apple to bring synergy to iOS, and it was live when the touchpad launched and also simultaneously died :(

webOS multitasking, and gesture navigation were way ahead of their time.

I had the touchpad as well and the OS design was incredible. They were doing things with WebOS that Apple and the like would imitate nearly half a decade later.

MeeGo survives in the form of Sailfish OS, doesn't it?

Not to mention Maemo, Moblin, Mer, etc. - for whatever reason, that project somehow became a zombie Voltron of other failed Linux mobile OS's, and involved big names: the Linux Foundation, Intel, Nokia, and all of these other companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo#Companies_supporting_the...).

It then got replaced by Tizen, which is a similar improbable survivor that was once backed by a bunch of big names and now lives on mostly in Samsung smartwatches.

Maybe it's proof that too many chefs spoil the broth. At least webOS now only has LG to look after it, rather than some sort of Linux-HP/Palm-LG consortium or whatever.

Tizen is about to be phased out of Samsung smartwatches. It's a bit unfortunate since battery life and a lot of other things are quite nice, but Samsung is really really really really bad at making developer friendly anything and pushing an open source firmware outside of their own borders which resulted in abysmal adoption and its ultimate demise.

Keep in mind that HP did the same with webOS, Sun with OpenSolaris etc. So, its not exclusive to Samsung, but rather big enterprise not understanding the outside world.

I actually blame apple. Essentially every one of those manufacturers wanted to replicate apples success in creating a walled garden instead of taking a different open approach. Essentially lack of visionary thinking.

As you said Samsung is terrible at DevRel, but Tizen OS itself is now pretty good. Tizen's survival in medium term is assured since it ships in Samsung TVs.

On the other hand, I am not sure even stellar DevRel would have saved Tizen. Yes, Sun was terrible with OpenSolaris, but wasn't Joyent stellar with SmartOS (which is the same codebase)? That didn't make SmartOS very successful.

They haven't learned the OS/2 lesson, making SmartOS great to run Linux based software doesn't make software shops go crazy to write with Solaris APIs.

You are wrong about Tizen. All new Samsung TVs ship with Tizen.

As far as I know, it's only used for LG TVs, but that's an enormous market. LG TV's market share is 15%, global #2.

LG also has a special webos variant for signage displays (I developed for it at my last job).