Nagel Clifford’s recent announcement of “closer cooperation with Google” has led to a few possible scenarios for Symbian.
An analyst company called J. Gold Associates has jumped on possibility three outlined in our editorial and took it a step further: they claim that S60 and Android will become one OS. Nokia immediately denied this, and there is a simple reason why it is now too late for this to happen:
Android developers already have finished apps
Both Google and the Symbian Foundation are painfully aware of the importance of third-party developers for the future of their platforms. Google’s developer championship has handed out thousands of dollars to people working on Android apps; S60 applications sell better every day according to our sponsors.
Unfortunately, the programming models behind Android and S60 are completely incompatible (cleanup stack, anyone?). Merging the two systems would require the management of two UI toolkits on top of a shared kernel: Access did so with their ALP and didn’t get too far.
Had Symbian gone oopen source a few months ago, a merger would have been possible. As it is now, the two systems are very likely to remain seperated…
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