WebOS never made a big splash as a smartphone or tablet operating system. But it looks like it might have a serious shot as a smart TV OS.

After acquiring the remnants of webOS from HP last year, LG started shipping smart TVs powered by the operating system in March. And in just a few months, LG says it’s sold over a million televisions running webOS software.

lg webos tv

Does that mean there’s a huge demand for webOS televisions? Not necessarily. LG is throwing the software onto big screen televisions that many people would have probably paid good money for whether or not they supported social updates from Twitter or video streaming from Netflix or Hulu Plus. After all, you could basically do the same thing by plugging a $50 Roku into the TV.

Still, the more webOS televisions end up in living rooms across the world, the more reason there is for third party app developers to support the platform by creating web apps designed to work with LG’s smart TVs — although LG says its focus is on providing the simplest possible user interface rather than the most features.

LG expects to bring the platform to more than 150 markets by the end of June, 2014 and sell as many as 10 million webOS televisions by the first half of 2015. And that could make webOS for TV a much bigger success story than webOS for phones and tablets ever was.

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5 replies on “WebOS lives on: LG sells a million webOS smart TVs”

  1. I was once a big webOS fan. Then HP bought and killed Palm and webOS pretty much and so went my enthusiasm. The TouchPad I still own (and use) can now run Android 4.4 quite well and you can also FULLY REMOVE webOS on it for more space making it a purely Android tablet and not a hybrid. Don’t get me wrong, I’m NOT a full-on Android fan either because I don’t trust Google itself. But it would take something monumental for me to return to webOS in any capacity – even a TV. I loved the interactivity and intuitiveness of the OS, but the lack of apps would be a death knell now in comparison to Android if it ever made it’s way back to a phone or tablet device in the future.

    1. There are a lot HTML OSs out, FirefoxOS, Tizen and WebOS even ChromeOS any app for any of this OSs would probably be ported easily for all the others so the HTML OSs perhaps together will have soon enough a good market share for some developers

  2. This is almost making me hope that Samsung does something good with Tizen on mobile phones, because you know that if Samsung finds success with Tizen, LG will want to copy that and use webOS on phones again.

    1. webOS was created smartphone targeted from start. So….. LG can’t copy anything

      1. Yes I know that, it’s why I’m hoping LG will “copy” Samsung in the sense of making their own phone with an in-house OS. It’s because webos was so good on phones.

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