Someone at Nokia once said iOS is like a house with all the doors facing outside. You have to go outside to get from your bed to the bathroom or kitchen or wher

Someone at Nokia once said iOS is like a house with all the doors facing outside. You have to go outside to get from your bed to the bathroom or kitchen or wherever else. Today, iOS and Android fundamentally use the same, inferior system with the app switcher being more like ctrl-alt-del on your windows machine (you can switch processes that way, but it’s not convenient). The “revolution” of webOS is how it decided NOT to change everything. It worked just like OSX did. Users tend to use the same half dozen programs constantly. They pin these to the dock. You’d open your app folder or start menu to see the rest. Same with webOS. Once they’re open, the default is to switch between them either by clicking windows or using exposé. WebOS Home Screen was also the windows swapper rather than an afterthought visual task manager. WebOS even had card groups that came very close to OS X spaces or KDE Activities. Your settings were a menu on the right. Just like OS X and you’re app menu was the upper left just like OS X. If Steve Jobs had seen the webOS UI, I’m completely certain the iOS UI would never have existed. The big issue that killed them was execution. The pre sucked. A phone without the physical keyboard would have done wonders at launch. Att our Verizon would have done wonders. Not having creepy ads would have sold units too. On the software side, minor tweaks to Linux would reduce boot time from two minutes to 30 seconds (bigger tweaks could probably have gone even farther with only one piece of hardware). They apparently just didn’t have the experienced devs. Likewise, at the point where the web was having its biggest growth spurt, they weren’t keeping up. They used a WebKit version and v8 version a year or two behind. Simply updating these two would have almost doubled performance while reducing memory problems. Finally, they built the core UI on Qt, but didn’t make it available to developers. They had a great, cross platform kit that could have gotten a lot of companies on board, but they didn’t run with it. I’d love for someone who was there at the time to explain what happened to cause so many simultaneous failures.