WebOS finds a strange new home at LG — in its smart TVS

You can’t keep a good operating system down.

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WebOS, which went down with the sinking TouchPad ship before being revived shortly thereafter, has found a new home: LG’s smart televisions.

In addition to the OS’s source code, LG is also picking up webOS’s remaining development team, documentation, and associated websites, the company confirmed on Monday afternoon. 

“It creates a new path for LG to offer an intuitive user experience and Internet services across a range of consumer electronics devices,” LG president Skott Ahn said in a statement.

The move is a strange but somehow fitting conclusion(?) to the long, tragic tale of webOS, which has seen more than its share of hardship over the last two years. The operating system always had a lot of promise, but not particularly effective executions. Perhaps LG’s buy will give webOS the attention it needs. 

More strange, though, is that LG says it has no plans to bring webOS to its smartphones, which is obviously the most sensible use for the operating system. LG, it seems, is fully committed to Android, even if Android hasn’t served it particularly well as of late.

In any case, I’m looking forward to seeing how webOS fares in the living room.

Updated: 1:40 Pacific with clarification & confirmation from LG