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I think you're genuinely forgetting how starved people were for phone applications when these devices first came on the market.

Developers were absolutely willing to make the investment. Billions of devices were about to come online.

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Most of those developers were looking for revenue, though, and there’s a really wicked network effect rewarding the popular platforms. By the time the first WebOS device launched in 2009 Apple had already shipped tens of millions of iPhones and Android was growing, too. By the time decent WebOS hardware was available, there just weren’t many developers looking to target a user base at least an order of magnitude smaller – even Android struggled because not as many users were willing to actually buy software.

Makes me think about the VR market. Tons of hardware, very few apps. It's interesting.

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