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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.'"
Isn't Nokia moving to MeeGo for their premier phones? Even the guy who runs a big Symbian fan site has given up.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
...is they keep forgetting if it's Symbian or Sybian that's "work safe"
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It is actively despised.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Minor nit -- it's not that you need a different phone to get tethering, you need a better carrier.
My Rogers iPhone works just fine for tethering. All I have to do is turn Internet Tethering on in the preferences, then plug it into the sync cable. Leopard pops up a dialog box which says something like "Hey! New Ethernet Interface found; would you like to use it?" -- click Ok, disable any other active network interface (or tweak your routing table) and bam: you're surfing on 3G.
I don't know how to do it in Windows, but it can't be much harder.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It is not a goner as an OS for mobile phones. It is a goner as a major platform for 3rd party apps and games on mobile smart phones. People who are interested in downloading and running lots of apps and games, probably own a droid, a nexus one or an iPhone. People who just use their phones as... hmmmm... phones, and don't give a shit about apps, are probably the biggest chunk of Symbian's market share.
The reason why it's ignored is because it's a pain in the ass to develop for. The options that you have is as follows:
* Download a very heavy C++ ide which was, till recently, locked down. You had to get a "professional" license if you wanted to do something useful. There is the "express" version but it was deliberately crippled. Oh yeah it only runs on Windows.
* If you wanted to distribute your app you had to get it signed. Ok sure yeah that sounds easy enough, but I can't tell you how often I get the "this app is untrusted" message.
* If you're a developer like me who is uncomfortable using a low level language you can go the Java route. Yeah. Write once, debug everywhere. It's a mess. I can't even get my midlet to get the IMEI code of the phone so I can use it for authentication.
* A beautiful middle ground is Python for S60. I tried to install it recently on my Nokia N73. A huge bag of fail.
* Yeah sure Symbian is open source. I want to download the source, build it and run it. Have you read the instructions to get it up and running under Linux? Let's just say that it goes way over my head. I heard on a podcast that Nokia uses some kind of circuit board made by Texas Instruments. Ok, so I need to go get some specialized device just to run the kernel? Please.
* Ooh ooh. There's also Qt Creator. Cool. Tried to install the demos. Didn't work.
* JavaFx. ... *sound of crickets*
So basically the choices you have as a developer are too many and every choice leads to a dead end.
It's really frustrating. That's why my next phone is the HTC desire. I can download and run the development environment on Linux. I can also be sure that my users will be able to run it without jumping through hoops. Trying to support an app running in Symbian is a nightmare.
Y
As a Brit living in Switzerland, I disagree. Nobody cares about Symbian in Europe either.
I used to work for Symbian a few years back. The company has comprehensively screwed every big decision it has taken. In no particular order, these were:
- Treating the app developer as some annoyance to be fobbed off whenever possible. No idea what's it's like now, but back in the day, to develop an app for Symbian you have to splash out on a compiler which retailed at over $2k. And if god forbid you wanted to actually debug code running on your device (rather than the not particularly good emulator), well, then you need a HW debugger box which ran to another $2k
- Completely and comprehensively fragmenting the eco-system whenever the slightest opportunity to do so arose. Hence Symbian never really existed as a platform per se - it was all an obscure and vast ecosytem of devices each with its own configuration - hence the prolliferation of Series 40, 60, 70, UIQ etc etc.
- As an operating system, Symbian was passable, although it was written way before it's time. Hence it assumed the C++ compiler didn't know about exception handling and did everyting possible to conserve every last resource of the device at the expense of making developing for it an activity which took quite a long time to acquire a taste for.
- Quite a few bits of Symbian got taken over by the detritus that got ejected from Ericsson and Lucent when they collapsed. Hence you had all these big company people introducing processes used to launch space shuttles into space - exactly what you don't need if you're trying to innovate in one of the most rapidly changing industries.
Or at least that's my 2c.
Yeah, that's why the iPhone has been selling so well in Europe and Japan.
No the real reason is that Nokia is a phone company. No one in tech news gives 2 shits about phone companies, they care about computer companies. Apple and Google, well they are computing companies, it's why they have actually made successful smartphone OSes and Nokia is lagging behind.
Both are dead ends.
Why develop serious applications for something that's only supported by a single manufacturer these days.
Right. Go see Symbian Foundation and click devices, then select year 2010 and apply. Which one of them is the single manufacturer that supports this open source platform?
It is what it is.
The phone OS with the biggest worldwide marketshare is a goner, because the phone is a goner. Few people want a phone; they want a personal computer that fits in their pocket and happens to be able to do "phone stuff."
Saying Symbian is the King of Phones, while possibly true, is like saying my rawhide whip business is the King of Buggy Whips. I could have 100% marketshare but you'd be a damn fool to invest in me, unless I tell you about how I'm getting into the chewy doggie-treat business.
The answer to "who makes the most typewriters?" isn't Wang or IBM. The correct and most accurate and enlightened answer is "who cares?"
Until recently you had to jump through hoops for all object construction and memory allocation. It was very difficult to write or use even basic algorithms that are compatible with both Symbian and anything else. See http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Two-phase_construction If you don't do it quite right, your code will probably still work in their "simulator," but will fail on the actual device. Remote debugging the simulator used to require two physical serial ports looped to each other via null modem cable.
Personally, I'd rather develop for any other platform.
It's been a year or so since I last used Symbian (thank science) but it struck me at the time just how much crap they put in the way of you actually developing apps.
Take this quite normal scenario: You need an extra engineer on cell phone app development. You need them to install an environment and be productive as soon as possible. Here's what happens with Android:
iPhone is much the same plus some sign-ups:
Here's Symbian/Nokia's idea of Getting Started:
Pardon my English, but that's not how to make a fucking SDK. I will refrain from talking about the daily experience of coding for Symbian, because I may start using a lot of profanity.
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.
OK, here's the two hundred ton elephant wearing a pink tutu dancing between Lady Gaga and Madonna that (surprisingly) nobody seems to have mentioned yet: for all intents and purposes, Symbian doesn't exist in the United States. As far as I know, you can't go to a store operated by Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile and buy a brand new phone subsidized by the carrier that runs Symbian (maybe, MAYBE Nextel might have one imported from Japan, but I wouldn't count on it).
Actually, it goes deeper than that -- as far as I know, you can't even buy a phone running Symbian, period, that's capable of 3G data on any network in the United States (with the *possible* exception of an imported Japanese phone that by some miracle of God might work on Nextel). For whatever reason, Symbian is almost a synonym for "Expensive GSM phone that nevertheless can't do EDGE, and is capable of 3G UMTS only at 1900/2100MHz". Thus, no sane American likely to be remotely interested in a phone running Symbian is going to go out and spend $500 or more to buy an unlocked phone that's basically a GPRS paperweight capable of making voice calls in a pinch.
"Invisible and Irrelevant in America" == "Invisible and Irrelevant to American Journalists" (who happen to generate most of the English-language content that gets read worldwide, and highly influence the rest of it). Thus, daily headlines about iPhone and Android. Occasional mentions of Palm. <tongue location="cheek">Symbian? Is that, like, the new name for Palm or Windows Mobile or something? </tongue>
The fact that Symbian started enforcing code-signing a couple of years ago (effectively shutting out casual developers who've always been welcomed with open arms by Android and pre-Kin/7 Microsoft) certainly hasn't helped, either... the moment they did that, they effectively wrote off a big chunk of their most influential and outspoken EUROPEAN former users, too.
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)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Typical american self centered point of view.
Slashdot is a U.S. centric Web site. If that bothers you, use another site.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Might be best now to just target Symbian Qt (with Nokia doing even new LGPL'd Qt Python bindings)
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.