Friday evening, after retailers began showing $99 liquidation prices for the discontinued HP TouchPad, Hewlett-Packard sent a missive to its registered WebOS developers, vaguely outlining the changes that will take place after the company shutters its WebOS hardware division and considers alternatives for the mobile operating system.

Here's the letter in its entirety:

Dear webOS developer:

We have opened the next chapter for webOS, and we understand that you must have many questions. Yesterday we announced that we will focus on the future of webOS as a software platform but we will no longer be producing webOS devices. While this was a difficult decision, it's one that will strengthen our ability to focus on further innovating with webOS as we forge our path forward. Throughout this journey, our developers will continue to be a vital part of the future of webOS.

We will continue to support, innovate and develop the webOS App Catalog. Our intent is to enhance our merchandising and presentation of your great products and to continue to build our webOS app ecosystem.

As many of you are aware, we are currently scheduled to hold many developer events around the world. We are planning to continue with these events, however, due to the recent announcements; the nature of them will change. These updates will be posted on our events registration site this coming week. We are eager to present to you the updated strategy for webOS and to hear your feedback.

Lastly, I wish to express our sincere appreciation for your ongoing support for webOS and the many teams responsible for it here at HP. This is a particularly dynamic time in the mobile industry and sometimes tough decisions need to be made about not only what to do, but also what not to do. This has been one of those times. Together with our great webOS developer community, we are confident that we will meet the challenges ahead and build momentum for optimal success.

We will be communicating with you frequently over the next few weeks and we look forward to hearing from you throughout this process.

Thanks for your support

Richard Kerris
VP webOS Developer Relations