Rise of Mobile Web Apps Will Give webOS A Time to Shine

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Hewlett-Packard yesterday announced the open source roadmap for its beleaguered mobile platform webOS. This is HP’s last-ditch attempt to actually turn webOS into a viable product after it acquired Palm in April 2010. It looks like the rebuilt source code for webOS will not be ready until September as HP takes the long view of the platform. Yet, when webOS is ready for prime time again, it may be just in time to take advantage of some of the deep current flowing through the mobile ecosystem.
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IDC analyst Al Hilwa likes where HP’s webOS roadmap is going:

“Great to see this outlined in some level of detail. I am not surprised that it will take till September to open this code. There is normally a significant amount of scrutiny and code grooming to ensure that any sizeable chunk of code would stand scrutiny form an IP perspective. This is standard operating procedure. I think putting WebOS in the Apache 2.0 license is a bold move likely to maximize chances of adoption by OEMs because Apache 2.0 is both familiar and permissive. The Enyo JavaScript framework is likely to have a life of its own separate from WebOS because of the difficulty of building good JavaScript frameworks with support for sensors and device hardware. All in all this is a good first step to what might shape up to be an important contribution to the community with many valuable components, but we will have to wait and see if there are any actual takers. Feature maturity compared to Android may be a challenge for WebOS, but the elegance of the user interface and a more participatory governance model should attract some players in the embedded development space.”

The beauty of webOS is that it is the one mobile platform that takes a Web-first approach to application building. If you take a look at its application framework Enyo, it is clear that that webOS does not adhere to the principles of “native” platforms like Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone or iOS.

One of the reasons that webOS was crippled in the era of the native platform is because it did not have a robust application ecosystem outside of its reliance on Web technologies. Palm built webOS to be of the mobile Web. In this way, Palm was ahead of its time back in the mid-2000s. Even when the iPhone first came out in 2007, it was designed to be a device to access the mobile Web. That all changed when Apple released the App Store in 2008 and the native model of application development and delivery was born.

It should come as no surprise that there were major similarities to Apple’s early approach to (what became) iOS and Palm’s webOS. A significant portion of Apple’s team at the time has spent time working on both platforms, including Andy Grignon, VP of webOS software and applications at HP (Grignon has some patents on a few of the prototype iPhones that Steve Jobs rejected).

Palm’s problem was that the mobile Web was not ready for devices. We are just now starting to see the problems facing mobile Web apps being addressed through the HTML5 spec such as CSS and rendering along with caching and device access to elements like the camera and accelerometer. The native platforms have had that advantage since the beginning.

This is where webOS has a chance. It straddles the line between Web and native in a very fundamental way. Mobile Web applications will continue to evolve in 2012 as progress is made on HTML5 and the spec and ecosystem mature. The webOS open source project should be designed to take specific advantage of those mobile Web apps. Upcoming releases of Enyo will include distribution of WebKit as along with Flash and Silverlight as plug-ins. The kernel will be based on the Linux Foundation’s standard kernel.

While HP has been criticized for how it has handled webOS, this new direction is exciting. Other mobile open source projects, such as Tizen, do not have the type of history and funcationality that webOS can offer. The biggest problem facing webOS when it is ready will be whether or not any of the major original equipment manufacturers will pick it up and run with it. Samsung would be a logical choice if it is starting to hedge its bets on Android reliance but HTC could make a dent in the ecosystem by differentiating itself through webOS.

What it may boil down to is this: Palm may have been ahead of its time with webOS, but it fell behind the times when the native app environment exploded. With the coming wave of HTML5 mobile Web apps, the time for webOS to shine may come again.

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