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The Future of Symbian

Posted by Hemos on from the where-do-we-go-now dept.

S3D writes "On 18 May 2004, Symbian, owner of the OS for high-end smartphones announced the formal launch of the Symbian Signed initiative for digitally signing and certifying Symbian applications that meet a set of test criteria. Gartner believes that Symbian Signed, in its current form, is a weak certification program oriented largely toward the needs of application publishers and network operators and may be inconvinient for developers. "

3 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. You'd think... by Short+Circuit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    and may be inconvinient for developers.

    ...that they might have said the same thing about all the mandatory copy protection systems in place (or proposed) on devices. Like console systems. Or Palladium.

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  2. Seem Familiar? by lachlan76 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think that I have heard this before...let me think...I'll get it...Microsoft Driver Signing. The point of that was to scare new users into buying alternate forms of hardware which have been produced by a manufacturer paid by Microsoft. While this isn't quite the same, it is restrictive to independant developers.

  3. False safety by Willeh · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I believe this will create a lot of resentment towards Symbian in the long run. The testing basically only gives you a guarantee that it will not run up your phonebill and or delete your range of oh-so cool ringtones/ sounds/ wallpapers/ whatevers. As the Gartner article points out, no work is being done to ensure usability, or even if the product is useful.

    It probably also means the developers get the green light to put huge "SYMBIAN APPROVED!!!!1" stickers on their products, which will be misleading to Joe Average PDA/CELL user. This in turn creates alot of resentment when the advertised product doesn't live up to the hype (that symbian indirectly helped create via the sticker), they will feel burned on the product and ultimately on Symbian products.

    Hell, even MS certified drivers have snuck by that made stuff break.

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