I wonder if a better approach would be to rebuild WebOS on top of an Android base instead? It seems like they are choosing to fight a war they cannot possibly win. If they want to run on other people's hardware why not build on top of a very well supported platform? Any rooted phone would have 100% driver support. Could be easier than installing a custom ROM. At least they would be able to get a foothold in the market. If my Galaxy Nexus could run the WebOS UI and continue to run legacy Android apps I would switch over right now. I know this isn't really the original goal of this project and maybe there are good technical reasons this would not be possible. It just seems like it would achieve the same thing in a more practical way. Perhaps they could maintain both a standalone WebOS and a WebOS/Android version?
Someone can probably build an app player for android apps, but architecture wise, what you just described sounds kind of like a custom UI for android.
The rationale for not doing something like this philosophically is that the underlying point of webos is that it shouldn't feel like a 'whole new platform' to a web developer, but rather the platform they are already most familiar with, even more than android, i.e the web.
Would it be that hard? It looks like people already have webOS running on Android device(s?). I thought that the Android kernel and main linux kernel have merged. Thus, the changes they've made should increase the ability to use it on Android devices.
