Quite a bit of time has passed since my first installment on all things Symbian – thank you all for the immense amount of feedback and comments about the topic. However, lack of community building is not the only problem faced by the Symbian boys…they furthermore suffer from having one of the oldest and most complex (and weirdest) operating systems currently on the market.
Even though the technology behind the Palm OS is likely to be older, it was very simple to grasp and was documented in a way which no other operating system manufacturer was able to match since. Symbian, on the other hand, was different: it was built to do many things the Palm OS does not, cloned many aspects of the then-evolving C++ standard (e.g. strings) and was (and still is) very badly documented. This leads to an extremely frustrating programming experience – things like leaves, descriptors and active objects can be extremely frustrating for a beginner who happens to work under time pressure.
Lack of interesting third-party applications leads to lack of customer interest…which in turn leads to developers abandoning the platform…thereby reducing the number and variety of applications and games further. But: as we saw in #1, customer interest in all things Nokia is not primarily due to apps but rather due to brand naming and other phone features.
This is good news for developers: few active developers means less competition and more revenue/head. Unfortunately, the man pictured on the left side is hell-bent on increasing the number of developers by making their work easier. Things like widgets and Flash Lite demand a lot less technical knowledge…which means that more and more developers will flood the market.
These developers will not only fuxate the market by creating competition for existing S60 folk, but will furthermore “pollute” the market: they have, on average, by an order of magnitude less knowledge than C++ developers and are essentially designers with a bit of ActionScript knowledge. They are thus much more likely to produce crapware, which will push down customer’s price and quality expectations.
This then leads to a situation like the one IBM faced when trying to sell OS/2 for 200 USD: customers expected operating systems to go for 50 bucks and were not willing to pay up. Now imagine a company like Resco having to sell News for 2$…a scenario which will likely see them ending all S60-related effort.
From my personal point of view, Symbian doesn’t need “more” developers. Instead, they need to become more appealing to good developers looking for new challenges. This can not be achieved by adding runtimes, but rather by making development more comfortable. Improve documentation and make signing free…and most issues would be solved.
What do you think?
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You don’t understand anything about marketing.
“few active developers means less competition and more revenue/head”
It’s good for the developpers, but bad for the final consumer. Duhhh ?
Carlos Silva
Nokia-Blog.net
@Carlos
This is a point of view expressed by a developer and about developers/development. Consumers (and bloggers) can stay out of this discussion.
What is bad for consumers is lame developers and wannabe bloggers which are releasing and propagating unsigned applications, confusing consumers into thinking that installing an application for Symbian requires some stupid hacking and membership to freak forums.
@Tam
Things are obviously partly true but at the same time more complicated. Better documentation and tools would help and Symbian Foundation’s new open view of the ecosystem will certainly be of benefit.
What we need now is a bunch of really good developers, the kind that will understand the active object concept in 15 minutes and not in 15 days, and which would see the beauty of the OS and embark in developing it further.
And then of course we need a successful and more relaxed application store, be it offered by Nokia or by somebody else.
Hello Folks,
nice to see the discussion starting up here again!
In case you are taking a stab at symbian-freak: I am very much on their side actually. Symbians introduction of Signing now bites all other developers as other shops are doing the same…and every site which rebels against it is something I fully support.
As for the active objects: I now understand them too. But the eeker is finding all the docs…they are spread across the WIKI, the forums, the symbian and the nokia docs and so on…
All the best
Tam Hanna
I don’t. They are helping no one. Protest against signing can be more effectively done by ignoring the platform not by shutting yourself in the foot.
Before the wide-spread of unsigned applications every developer could obtain a developer certificate, now I would need one and I can’t get it, I have to work with that weird Open Signed thing …
Hi John,
I have to fully agree here: things like Yxes and unsigned apps definitely have made things more difficult for some of us.
On the other hand, we now have the free Open Signed Online and the Express Signing…which IMHO is not bad.
As for developer certificates: could you tell me more on what changed?
All the best
Tam Hanna
Here’s what I think about this:
I think the Symbian Foundation should stay out of the runtimes (Web, Flash, Java), 3D touch experiences, app store and cloud services business and get the basics right.
Not that I think that competing with iPhone, Android, WebOS or RIM is a bad goal – just that they should not be SF’s priority.
Hi Duncan,
thank you so much for your comment!
The problem with “bare-bones” distributions IMHO is standardization: if we leave all coolness to Nokia et al, they will do their best to be incompatible…makes perfect sense for them after all.
All the best
Tam Hanna