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I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days
(philmckinney.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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I developed one of the top ten apps in the webOS App Store. I released it about 6 months before they shuttered Palm and started the transition of webOS in to a vague "embedded and mobile things" open source OS that eventually ended up on, primarily, LG televisions.
It was my first big success as a computer science student. When I started working on my next big app idea it was about 80% complete when the new dropped that they were discontinuing all phones and tablets. Palm used to send me free phones and tablets too, and I spent a lot of time in the community forums, I had reviews on webOS Nation, and so on
I maintain to this day that enyo is one of the greatest app development frameworks ever written and I wonder what the landscape of web development would look like today if they'd moved faster to liberate it from mobile devices. The webOS team were also earlier adopters of nodeJS for their native services. It felt like living in the future using them at a time when the iPhone 4 was barely out.
If you can believe it, after that I moved over to Windows Phone, where history repeated without the afterlife. After that, I felt cursed but, honestly, I chose both platforms because the stores weren't saturated with 100 versions of every app imaginable.
They were great times. Five big mobile platforms, free devices, open APIs to work with - it really was a digital gold rush.
I now have LG TVs in every room and it's so strange to use webOS in it's final(?) form. Wonderfully, there's a homebrew community just as there was back in the day, albeit on a much smaller scale. I've even made a wrapper for some home assistant features.
webOS is dead. Long live webOS
You're the goat.
I had a similar story with BlackBerry 10
That was one of the big 5 in my mind. I never did any BB dev, but I remember looking into it at the time. If I couldn't get a device for cheap or free it was inaccessible. Student life is what it is. By the time I made my webOS money they were already on the decline and considering a move to android so I didn't consider it thereon.
Just watched the Jay Bachurel movie recently and can recommend. It's a bit slow but the nostalgia is top grade.
I gotta say, I actually enjoyed the time programming for BlackBerry. It was the only time I actually did C++/Qt professionally. And the APIs were very inspired on the iOS/MacOS ones, so it was kinda easy for me to migrate later to iOS.
But just the same way, the guys in the university lab back then got a few BB10 devices just for sending apps to their app store.
Glen Howerton as Balsilly knocked it out of the park with that performance
That was a good read, thank you
I was an avid Windows Phone user. What app did you develop? I might know it from the 10 that were available.
Nothing well known on WP, and I don't want to give names as it'll dox me given reviews are out there somewhere.
One was a different take on a Twitter app and another was a minimalist Instapaper app. I will say no more!
Unrelated fun story: I rewrote a plugin integration for a WP game from a fairly well known studio, 5 minutes before it was demoed live at GDC in SF, back around 2011 (+-1 year). And it went off without a hitch! Good times