Emulator

The webOS SDK originally provided an emulator for development purposes, with disk images for major releases of the OS. Unfortunately, these were delivered as Java JARs with a corresponding tool to generate the VM in specific versions of VirtualBox.

To make things easier in a modern era, webOS Archive has re-packaged the SDK emulator as an OVA Virtual Appliance that should work on current versions of VirtualBox (and probably other virtualization tools) on current operating systems. This appliance emulates a webOS Touchpad device, with many limitations. If you wish to emulate other webOS devices, you may wish to explore the SDK.

Download from GitHub

OVA Creation

Usage Notes

The emulator includes a Radio Simulator that lets you simulate events in the guest OS.

Keyboard Shortcuts

You can simulate some hardware events and states with keyboard shortcuts:

  • End (use Fn+Right Arrow on a Mac): Opens and closes the launcher
  • Esc: Performs the back gesture (or swipe back)
  • Home (use Fn+Left Arrow on a Mac): Minimizes and maximizes the card
  • Left/Right Arrow: Switches the application left or right in the Card view
  • F5: Simulate shaking (Not implemented)
  • F6: Simulate "up" (12:00 or normal) orientation
  • F7: Simulate "down" (6:00) orientation
  • F8: Simulate "right" (3:00) orientation
  • F9: Simulate "left" (9:00) orientation

Limitations

Since its dervied from the SDK emulator, all the limitations of that emulator apply. From the SDK:

Currently, the Emulator does not support the following:

  • Accelerometer live data (does support orientation and shaking events)
  • Audio
  • Bluetooth (UI and any interface-specific APIs do not work in the Emulator)
  • Camera
  • Gesture area
  • Multi-touch
  • Sound
  • Video
  • Wi-Fi (UI and any interface-specific APIs do not work in the Emulator but, with a desktop connection, network connectivity does.)

Additionally, webOS in a modern era is heavily dependent on a SSL-bump proxy to get around the limitations of its ancient SSL-stack. Unfortunately, the proxy-setting system calls do not appear to be present in the emulated OS, meaning that HTTPS is not available in the emulator.

NOTE: advanced users may be able to manually setup a proxy following these instructions.

Finally, while most webOS SDK apps were cross-platform, some advanced apps and services, and many PDK apps, were processor-specific. As the emulator provides an x86 environment to the guest OS, anything compiled for the hardware-native ARM platform will not work on the emulator.

Preware

Preware needs to be compiled differently for the emulator. The required i686 build can be found here.