Indeed, I'm immensely curious about the OS (I'm an unabashed OS junkie) and if it's not Android based I want one just to dig into that part of it. Beyond that, the display and the GUI are absolutely gorgeous. I was always a fan of Microsoft's flat design for Windows Phone, and this takes it to another level of minimalism. I'm drooling over here.
Edit: I see below that it's Android based after all. I still love the way it looks but it's a hard pass. :-(
We had to im sorry. Its quite unrealistic for a startup to write its own OS from scratch. And there's the app topic that everyone else failed at.
We always had a vision to do an open web-based (Chromium like) os when it becomes realistic.
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).
Edit: I see below that it's Android based after all. I still love the way it looks but it's a hard pass. :-(