Correction: They’re just *completing* the apps they had in development before HP’s Board and CEO unilaterally destroyed the credibility of webOS as a platform.

I can’t name one *new* app that’s been announced by anyone *notable* since the announcement in August. Hobbyist and amateur efforts? Sure. The top-tier developers successfully recruited for the platform left almost immediately after it became painfully obvious that the Touchpad was failing and HP wouldn’t stand behind it after repeated promises of “doubling down” on a realistically potential Android-topping mobile OS.

I was a webOS user from the first day when I stood in line at a Sprint store in June, 2009 for a Palm Pre and a developer for the first wave of devices up through the Touchpad, which I bought second-day. I’ve never seen so many talented people build such a fantastic mobile platform just to watch it pissed away by bad hardware, bureaucracy, and just plain inept business practices as webOS has been.

HP’s announcement i just the end of the road in a long line of disappointments and missteps. Most developers for the platform left long ago when Palm was sold to HP and months long dry spell in new device announcements happened–an eternity when new devices on competing platforms are announced almost bi-weekly. Those that remained behind were and are admirable; those that remain after HP’s announcement last month are holding on irrationally out of emotional attachment rather than sound business practice.

Perhaps HP will polish up webOS 3.x to the point of converging the Phone and Tablet versions of the OS in order to sell it off to a company that can take the baton and actually do something befitting of it. That’s probably the best anyone can hope for anymore–and believe me, while I’d love to see it, we webOS users and developers have already been down this road more times than many would publicly admit.