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 Originally Posted by eblade
Well, there are about 200 million TVs sold each year, and there are about 400 million smartphones sold each year. OK, so, theoretically, your maximum potential market is twice as large on a cell phone.
Oh, hey, with web apps, it's not too difficult to make cross platform apps that do the same thing in many different form factors. So it's totally possible that someone could write an app that works on phones, tablets, and TVs ... and any other platform that we can think of. SO, you can have a potential market of the entire subset of those 600 million devices (i didn't even look up tablets) that are capable of running Enyo... which is probably all of them that are reasonably smart. :-)
Interesting figures, but we should bear in mind that of the 200 million TVs sold, not all will be smart & not all will have webOS. Enyo does not support support other Smart TV platforms - unless ChromeCast & the Chrome browser are basically the same thing (no idea).
Supported Platforms | Enyo JS
Another factor to consider is that phones tend to be replaced at a faster rate than TV's and when it comes to smart TVs, there is a question about whether manufacturers will offer OS updates or expect people to entirely replace perfectly good screens every couple of years. It seems reasonable to assume that 4K will remain the standard for a while. A miss-judgement here could mean that set top boxes or media PCs are the future - but there's no reason webOS can't be on those.
On the other hand, Enyo does support desktop browsers, which also means laptops and tablets (which will be likely to run a desktop or mobile phone browser). This means the potential app market place is even broader and one advantage that Enyo might have in this multi-platform world is of course, it's cross-platform ability.
But something often mentioned is 'second screen'. For me this could be a distraction when I want to concentrate on a show, but there are ways that it could be used. Specifically, I think if Enyo apps can crack the ability to seamlessly transfer content to different screens, this will be big. You download a movie to a device, then send it to the TV, pause a game on a handheld device then use it as a controller to resume play on the bigscreen, even send some content to other screens in your house or share with friends. This kind of continous client, or even sharing client could work quite well, but would need a lot of backend engineering. But perhaps webOS already has that kind of thing.
That level of usefulness and connectivity could be the big webOS/Enyo selling point that might lead to a certain ubiquity that will ultimately....
...bring back webOS phones! Yay!
Oh, I think my alarm clock is ringing! Time to wake up!
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