Symbian, the Biggest Mobile OS No One Talks About

blackbearnh writes "The iPhone vs. Android wars are in full swing, but no one talks about the mobile operating system that most of the world uses: Symbian. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that the Symbian developer infrastructure is so different from the Wild West approach that Apple and Google take. Over at O'Reilly Answers, Paul Beusterien, who is the Head of Developer Tools for the Symbian Foundation, talks about why Symbian gets ignored as a platform despite the huge number of handsets it runs on. Quoting: 'Another dimension is the type of developer community. [Historically, Symbian's type of developers] were working for consulting houses or working at phone operator places or specifically doing consulting jobs for enterprise customers who wanted mobile apps. So there's a set of consulting companies around the world that have specialized in creating apps for Symbian devices. It's a different kind of dynamic than where iPhone has really been successful at attracting just the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.'"

Comments

Symbian is a goner

[MBCook]

Isn't Nokia moving to MeeGo for their premier phones? Even the guy who runs a big Symbian fan site has given up.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Luckyo]

SymbianS60v3 and S60v5 (also known as Symbian^1) still powers pretty much all nokia's touch screen phones, which alone sell more then android and iphone combined.
Symbian^2 is fairly popular in Japan, due to its extremely low system requirements (same as ^1 really), and some specialized features.
Symbian^3 which is being developed for n8 seems to be the natural evolution of Symbian^1, i.e. mid range smart phone OS.

The problem is that unlike android and iphone, these phones are very competitively priced, and sacrifice "bling" features for actual function, such as better features, lower price and business-directed application support. As a result, there's many fewer people with "loose money" who are willing to sink a few euros/dollars/etc into some funny looking application on a weekly basis. They also tend to look much less pretty, focusing on function, and have slower hardware, meaning less responsive UI, which is advertised as a major feature on IOS and android.

This is really noticeable even on OVI store. Almost no games, but a shitload of various business-oriented and rather expensive applications ranging from call recorders to improved ms exchange handling to translation software. This stuff just doesn't sell to the young adult croud. Add to that the fact that much of smartphone hype is US-driven, and Symbian being big pretty much everywhere in the world but the US, you get the perfect storm scenario where little players on the market completely outshine the real behemoth in marketing and publicity.

iPhone (and Android) have both kinds

[SuperKendall]

If you look around, you can ALSO find the same groups of people doing consulting work for companies around iPhone and Android development. Yes it's true that both platforms also have the hobby developers, but that's only a small part of the overall market.

In fact if you think about it you could argue the iPhone had a leg up on said base of serious developers, because there was already a reasonably large base of professional Mac developers around before the iPhone - I would argue probably more than there were ever dedicated Symbian developers.

The problem Symbian had is the same problem WinCE and the same problem Android WOULD have had if, being Java based, they had just tried to bring J2ME forward a bit more into the smartphone realm. Both Android and iPhoneOS are designed from the ground up to be fully featured operating systems, without a ton of compromises and pretty old design philosophies baked into other existing mobile platforms. Yes there are a ton of Symbian devices around, but does that matter when you know you can sell an order of magnitude more software developing for the iPhone or Android?

It's only a matter of time before corporate use of these two platforms totally eclipses Symbian development in the enterprise, if it's not already happened.

 

Re:20,000 fart applications?

[fm6]

Sure, most iPhone and Android apps are useless and/or redundant. I can personally confirm this for Android, and there's no reason to assume iPhone is any different. But you're taking exactly the wrong lesson from this.

Ask yourself why thousands of losers bother to write and publish "fart" apps for these platforms. Because it's easy to do, that's why. And that easiness means there are a lot of gems amongst all those turds.

Let's see. (Pulls out HTC Hero.) I've got Evernote (notebook, automatically syncs to web and PC versions) MortPlay (the only MP3 player that suits my particular needs, had to sort through a couple dozen others to find it), StreamItRadio (MP3 streams, same comments), Weather Channel (automatically updates itself based on my current location) and Yelp (very handy when I'm in a strange neighborhood and feeling peckish). Not a lot of apps, but I haven't seen comparable apps on other platforms. Don't know about Symbian, but I'll bet not.

Oh yeah, and there are direct links on my Android desktop for Google Reader (never know when you might have to wait in a really long line) and for the web pages for the BART stations I use the most. Those last ones get updated once a minute with actual (not scheduled) train arrivals, which minimizes my stand-around time.

None of these features are life-changing, but I find them worth having. And I don't see anybody rushing to write similar apps on Symbian.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Sort of. It's clear (Apple said so themselves!) that iPhone targets only "premium" people living in "premium" places.

Meanwhile Nokia sells annually an order of magnitude more mobile phones than Apple has ever produced; Nokia contributes greatly to the world having close to 5 billion mobile subsribers by now (for many of them, first practical means of communication) - that's a monumental shift for humanity. Apple isn't interested in contributing to it much (what, with ~1%?), perhaps is even freeriding (we'll see how that dispute ends up)

Nokia Qt SDK

[guruz]

I really hope that the Nokia Qt SDK will change the Symbian 3rd party developer landscape.
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/
Disclosure: I work inside Nokia on Qt.