Nokia outspent the other licensees all together by something like 4 to 1 in terms of license fees for volumes sold and in terms of consulting. But it influenced the behaviour and decisions made within Symbian all the time. It was after all a business and looking after your biggest customer is good business sense.
Symbian was supposed to be an equally balanced organisation. Licensees generally played by the rules, more afraid of antitrust and losing their place in the value chain to Microsoft. Except for one. Nokia blocked inclusion of a standard camera API in the Symbian product roadmap claiming it would be years before anyone built a cameraphone, weeks before the launch of the , the first GSM cameraphone. With CDMA technology a defacto monopoly for Qualcomm, the obvious solution would be to build the reference software stack on Qualcomm hardware.
Nokia, in turn, proceeded to cancel several CDMA devices late in the development cycle during their frequent retreats from North America. Thus did Symbian become an organisation in which anyone could say no but no one but Nokia could say yes. So to the future. Despite comments from their management lately committing to the open source Symbian Foundation, Nokia already maintain their own internal Symbian codeline, occasionally releasing changes to the public mainline.
With no other licensees the Japanese also forked years ago , there is no reason to keep the Foundation going. Other licensees will never return to the platform unless a huge effort is made to provide a totally off the shelf, ready to run build of the platform supporting all popular hardware platforms.
Qt, however, is the right strategy for the application suite and for third party developers, it just needs to be finished and soon! It needs to be core to the Nokia software operation not a fringe activity. Analysts are starting to understand that Symbian is a platform only for phones not for internet phones.
Nokia needs to continue to educate the market to remove the risk of perception becoming fact. If they do not, they remain a company with tremendous assets but depressed market cap based almost purely on perception, and therefore a prime takeover target. The lesson for Meego, and other pretenders to the crown is, perhaps to look after your developers with useful APIs and powerful tools both inside and outside of your organisation.
Find the right balance between efficiency and ease of development. Look after all of your developers and your developers will look after you. Tim would like to thank dw2 for giving him his big break into the industry. CrunchBase Information. Symbian Software Ltd. Tim Ocock. I remember in one case there were 10, requirements to get Symbian products onto that one carrier's network.
A typical carrier requirement would anything from do or don't include wi-fi support to where things showed up on a menu. Symbian, once a high-end platform, stagnated — it couldn't change fast enough to compete and so attract developers. When the Symbian Foundation was created and the decision to open source the OS was taken, it hoped to unleash the software — from its licence fee, from its closed roots, and from the supply chain that held it hostage.
By going open source, the Foundation hoped they'd give operators the confidence to keep investing in the platform. The signs were good: by going open source, the foundation was taking Symbian out from under the dominance of Nokia, and removing the licence fee. Moves were made to address the question of fragmentation with unification of Symbian UIs under Series 60 and the addition of the Qt software layer which would make porting apps across platforms — MeeGo, Series 40 and Symbian, a lot easier.
There were even efforts to tackle the apps and ecosystem question. After Nokia's launch of its own, rather than a Symbian, app store provoked "much heated discussion and conflict", the Foundation started work on an uber-store with APIs that third-parties could use to fashion their own stores from. For example, developers with five apps could make a mini-store just containing those apps.
Better yet, they could sell them through the Foundation's channel without the organisation taking a cut. There was still a lot of conflict, some infighting among the manufacturers and issues that needed to be resolved" such as who would pay for the necessary development work, said Williams. And, despite the promising initial signs, those who had joined the Foundation in its early days began to peel away. For Wood and West, the problem that really saw Symbian fall apart was, retrospectively, inherent from its very beginning.
Symbian's ability to set an independent course was "ultimately constrained by the dual role of its largest shareholder and customer [ To begin with, the existence of such divided leadership suggests a broader problem of defining and operationalising platform leadership with multiple leaders. For example, Gawer and Henderson define Microsoft and Intel as platform leaders [with Wintel]; if the Symbian platform were similarly defined, then the leaders would be Symbian and ARM but clearly platform licensees played a crucial if not controlling role in its evolution.
When Nokia announced in that it was ditching Symbian as its primary smartphone platform in favour of Windows Phone , it effectively signalled that the end was nigh for the OS.
Nokia said it would wind down its use of Symbian, and later that year announced that Accenture was to take over development work and support for the OS. That outsourcing deal will close in , and is unlikely to be renewed. Nokia has been Symbian's biggest champion throughout its life and, when it said this month that last year's PureView will be the last Symbian device it ever makes, it was the final nail in the OS' coffin.
When the Accenture deal finally runs out, Symbian will be over 15 years old. Series 40 - Nokia's proprietary, budget OS — practically shares a birthday with Symbian; it too is around 15 years old.
When you got your first phone, there's a good chance in ran Series 40, and for many people in developing economies, the same is still true.
When it was clear that the iPhone and Android duopoly was having a significant impact on Nokia, it was thought that the low-end Series 40, not Symbian, would be axed and that Symbian would take over as Nokia's midrange and budget OS of choice.
It was not to be. As Dean Bubley, founder of mobile analysts Disruptive Analysis, wrote in : "There has been a certain amount of speculation that Nokia would push Symbian and S60 down further into the feature phone space, perhaps even getting rid of S That's clearly nonsense - S40 has to sell at price points right down to the bottom end of the GSM market, and up to some pretty decently-featured higher-end 3G devices.
Symbian won't scale down that low. Rumours surfaced again that Series 40 was for the chop last year, with Nokia working on a lightweight Linux OS called Meltemi, destined for mid-to-low range that Series 40 traditionally occupied.
In the middle of last year, it was reported that Meltemi development work had been killed off as part of cost-cutting efforts at Nokia, and the company would be sticking with Series Meltemi, according to Reuters sources , was "to replace its Series 40 software in more advanced feature phones Meltemi would enable a more smartphone-like experience on those simpler models.
Today, Nokia is targeting three main consumer segments with Series 'first time buyers' — those buying phones for the first time, or phones with a particular feature set such as music or video for the first time; older users who've been with Nokia for some time and have decided they don't need or want a smartphone; and young, urban consumers, typically in emerging economies, who want to be able to access social content and services on their phones but are constrained by their budgets and their mobile networks.
A handful of months after Meltemi had met its end, Nokia began to count its touch-input Asha range, which run Series 40, as "smartphones". However, it's a nomenclature that most industry watchers would disagree with — Series 40 devices are more often considered feature phones, touch or no touch, as the OS doesn't run native apps a key facet of a smartphone , just web and Java apps.
It was only in mid that Nokia began to push Series 40 as a platform for apps, and mainly web apps at that. Apps for Series 40 come in two flavours, web and Java. In April , it introduced Nokia Web Tools — Eclipse-based tools which allow developers to create web apps for the Ovi browser — the proxy browser found on Series 40 phones. The next year, it brought out the 2. And while Symbian failed to capitalise on its headstart in building an ecosystem, Series 40 doesn't seem to have suffered too badly from being late to the party.
While download figures are low considering the platform shifts hundreds of millions of devices a year, momentum is growing. Around 15 million Series 40 apps are downloaded a day, according to Nokia, and 42 percent of the last billion apps downloaded from the Nokia Store were for Series 40; a figure likely to rise considering the steep drop in Symbian shipments.
It's a very, very major source of downloads of applications and content for us. It's something that very much we're interested and continuing to drive," Elop told analysts recently, adding: "We can offer [developers] an opportunity to make their applications visible and marketed to a very much larger customer base than virtually any ecosystem, so there is some strength there. I kept my N for years longer than most people because it has a quality DAC and, as long as I kept it in airplane mode, it was a good music player for the classical and jazz I listen to on high-quality headphones when traveling.
So much of the cool things you could go with the N — Emacs and the whole OS it brings along, writing your own scripts in the terminal — were due to its hardware keyboard. A modern smartphone that lacks a hardware keyboard is just a pain to hack. First, it works and do the job of being a phone and it has a great keyboard for sms.
It also lack a bunch of anti-features. No calling the mothership. No advertisements. No constant attempts to get me to register, to send gps information, to get me to do things which I don't want to do but the manufacturer do. Interface is clean, fast enough, intuitive to use.
It has the few apps I want to use like the terminal, fosdem schedule and also a virtual debian machine. All the third-party stuffs still get regular updates. In the future I don't know what will replace it. The free software phones are interesting but I have my doubts about how practical they will be.
On the proprietary side there are the foldables, but it is still a touch keyboard. There are feature phones, but many seems to now days be smartphones in disguise.
OK, but I hope you are aware that even the third-party stuff still uses the 2. That is why many if not most idealistic N owners moved on to LineageOS, while hoping that something like the Neo or the Librem 5 or the Pinephone would eventually remove the need for Android entirely.
You can use a mainline kernel. Without the GPU.. Eh, not really. Symbian was right for the wrong reasons. They were right to warn users about apps using internet access, but they were wrong about the reason - it was about data caps, not privacy or security. Data caps mattered in that era, so from a narrow point of view it was the smart thing to offer those features.
It's like saying RealPlayer 'won' against YouTube. No, they didn't. They just mistimed an idea, and a few implementation details were the same. That's like saying because everyone else has 'pervasive multithreading', BeOS won even when it was a commercial failure.
Everyone else did it better. It's not about who invented it first, its about innovating over other inventions. Symbian still failed commercially in the market and couldn't compete or innovate with the other competitors. ClumsyPilot on June 25, parent next [—]. If the 'winners' have to adopt your ideas, you've won. At least if your ideas where more important to you than 'winning'. They innovated away privacy and security by relying on the human poor ability of impulse control and hardship with delayed gratification.
Basically they made everything shiny and addictive. Is that really innovative? Perhaps 'bad' ui is better when you consider higher order consequences as opposed to concentrating only on first order popularity contest?
I'm not saying Nokia and symbian were better BTW. This is a ridiculously shallow dismisal. Android and iOS "won" because the phones were vastly more capable. Except they weren't. At the time, the US had really crap phones compared to Europe which itself was behind Japan.
The Nokia N95 could do everything. The original iPhone was pretty much laughed at by Nokia insiders because it lacked so many features. People tend to forget that you had a desktop quality browser in the first iPhone. Opera was available for it. Dismissal of what? I'm not saying symbian was a better os. I'm saying sometimes innovation and commercial success are not indicators of better solutions.
Android won because it is free beer that the OEMs don't have to pay anyone for licenses, save on development costs and can stick to outdated versions as long as they feel like it. I used Symbian. It was annoying. Easy of use and better UX is a very valuable "innovation". Nokia actually had a touchscreen UI called Series90 but that went nowhere, they dismissed touchscreens completely initially, and then went with resistive touchscreens on the disastrous N I'm currently reading The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek, and he talks about exactly that: is your game finite or infinite?
If infinite like any business , there is no "winning" in that kind of "game" because there are so many standards by which one could say he beats the competition win : is it market share, cashflow, valuation, innovation?
Symbian was probably right about how it was handling of security, but it "lost" by disappearing from the game. It is only tangentially related, but Symbian in fact had even more pervasive multithreading than even BeOS.
BeOS had a thread for each BWindow. So 5 browser windows is 5 threads for the windows and 1 for the BApplication. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. In the marketplace of ideas, both Symbian and BeOS eventually won the argument. They didn't win commercially. By adopting all of the ideas that CoffeeScript made mainstream for front-end web development. Financially, the brand matters. If Uber fails commercially, but ushers in an age of gig economy transportation, the idea won but the brand did not.
As an investor or employee, you care deeply about the brand. But as someone trying to change the world, you care deeply about the idea coming to pass by any means necessary.
Sutherland did not get rich. In this era I was into mobile phonery is that a word? Not as a developer but an end user hacker lite, all the flexibility it offered over other choices at the time most devices were "dumb". They had a shot and a solid following on HowardForums and just sort of blew it and let the competition outrun them. Author is agreeing that Symbian failed for good reasons at the very end of a very short blog post.
Bud on June 25, prev next [—]. This analysis elides the fact that all OSes in the Symbian era had to compulsively ask about accessing the Internet because data usage was at such a premium. Spooky23 on June 25, parent next [—]. Not until iPhone. It was awful in many ways, but like living in the future with superpowers. I had Google Maps at any time, etc. I was between jobs when we got married, and my wife and I went on a two month roadtrip for our honeymoon. Data speed was never an issue, only signal.
The good news is that era was where cities started throwing up free Wifi, so it worked out. I'd say that from a UX experience, being one of the few users in was a better experience than EDGE connectivity or 3G in some areas on the iPhone after it's release! I had my first Titanium Powerbook back then and when we needed internet, we would find a high school and pull into the parking lot and nine times out of ten there would be an open wifi network with internet access.
That was a revolution. Before that, yes, you could run up a massive phone bill. That revolution? I remember paying metered data that cost around 0. Having "unlimited" data is indeed revolutionary. I had an unlimited 3G internet plan pre-iPhone. I forget the exact price but it was cheaper on the family plan than the unlimited iPhone data plan.
That's not completely correct. My NEC smartphones didn't. Nor did the early BlackBerrys that I used. LeonM on June 25, root parent next [—]. I guess that's why NEC and Blackberry never took off in Europe, as the data usage would financially ruin you. With prices of about 5 euro per megabyte you lived in constant fear of accidentally using data.
Blackberry was quite popular in the UK amongst the corporate users, however BBM universally came with it's own data plans and they had their software running inside the cell providers as well as within the organization itself. BBM absolutely did take off with youngsters for a while - I sold a lot of blackberries to teenagers in the U. Blackberry failed for much same reason it failed everywhere else - much better phone platforms came out very quickly etc. I don't remember Windows Mobile asking for permission to use mobile internet either.
So that's why I used a MB modem plan in my smartphone then MB before cheaper regular phone plans became available. Phone calls were 1. BB worked slightly different before 3g and it's advancements made mobile internet pretty much "free" for most people.
BlackBerry came with it's own data plans and they had they used integrate with the mobile providers on a much lower level than just internet traffic. Blackberry OS definitely did this, and it was brilliant because you could allow the NYTimes application to access news.
I still have my nokia c It works fine, it stills takes picture, and it's 9 years old. The battery last for about 1 week or less. I really wish I could have a smartphone with similar hardware that I could upload some executable on it written in C. I still cannot believe there are no minimalist RPi-like smartphone that lets you easily do this. Smartphones today are overpriced supercomputers with asthmatic batteries with hardware that is possibly full of backdoors.
I actually never understood why iOS and Android don't offer the same system browsers offer for the Web. When you pick a file, the OS prompt a screen to navigate through your pictures to pick the item you want and give it to the webpage. Because this workflow is what most of the apps needs.
I don't want apps to have access to all my storage system, but just the picture I want to share. The same system could be applied to contacts as well.
Android gives this option, and also gives the option for acessing arbitrary files too for other user cases. Most of apps use the second option anyway for other purposes, so they see little trouble in doing a custom file picker. AgloeDreams on June 25, parent prev next [—]. In messaging apps, it is seeing the photos in a small view. Instagram has a full screen browser to enable their own chosen UX.
Edit: I just saw a really neat alternative view in iOS 14 whereas the 'allow access to photos' modal gives the option to pick and choose what photos are 'shown' by the OS. It's so rare that I might have never seen it, or completely forgot about it. However, now that you mention it, I think I remember it from my early days on iOS. If I download Instagram and refuse to access my local storage, I guess I won't be able to share a picture from my phone, right? Not from within the app, but if you go into the Photos app and share a photo from there, you can choose to share to Instagram, and Instagram will get only that one photo.
DaiPlusPlus on June 25, root parent prev next [—]. Third-party apps could provide a custom UX to sensitive data by providing a separate executable that the device's OS then runs in a sandboxed process with read-only access to your sensitive data and without the means of communicating anything with the source app's process.
When the user has completed whatever task the sandbox was needed for e. I think this is how Android works now, and has for a few years. It is crazy that it wasn't always this way, though. Apps in the past could choose to request access to all your photos just to let you pick; but now I think that will get you removed from the Play Store maybe? It was always this way. But when you can integrate the picking into your app and avoid trying to learn a zero-permission approach because users just hit OK at install time anyway And thus back in the day very little things used this, because there was very little reason to avoid just requesting every possible permission.
A very small part of the Symbian OS consisted of a useful feature that is now similarly implemented in iOS and Android. That hardly deserves the extremely click-baity headline of "Symbian Won" "Symbian Won on User Permissions" would be reasonable, and probably get less attention.
Symbian and Java ME was awful as well was not developer friendly at all till towards the very end. By then it was too late. You never had a choice to get rid of the annoying untrusted app pop up, and getting code-signing was a nightmare.
Apple was in contrast incredibly developer friendly when they started their store and then Android one-upped them only 25 usd to join! I worked in the mobile phone industry 00s. For example, file system was a service and handles like a log file handle were not transferable across threads. It made porting apps a pain. Developer tools existed, but were shit and usual failure mode was app crashing without a reason.
Symbian had shitty developer experience because internally they did not have a "Dev experience and third party app development" stakeholder.
They had kernel, seats for various hardware vendors, mobile and wifi standards, but not for third party devs. Nokia itself was blind for its mistakes as in-house they could get whatever source code or access they wanted.
Note that there were non-Symbian mobile phones as well e. So Symbian was kind of Android, but no default UI and closed source. GekkePrutser on June 25, prev next [—]. Another thing that Symbian did really really well was networking. You could choose per app which connection they should be using, or even a group with order of preference. It was brilliant because all these connections could be active at the same time. Apple and Google are only just catching up to this now with tricks like Per-App VPN but it still doesn't offer the same level of flexibility.
More importantly, why did they ask you about secure connections, but automatically assume that insecure connections were okay? These days https is so fast no one think about its overhead over plain text connection anymore. Not sure if that's the reason for the prompt though. Dark ages my friend. Got depression doing Symbian development. I am not kidding.
GekkePrutser on June 25, parent next [—]. Yeah it was a bitch to develop for I tried it for a bit but then they started including J2ME and I switched to that. It wasn't as good as native but it worked. And was one hell of a lot easier to develop in. Same here. Easily the worst dev experience I have had on any platform. The worst part was that the platform itself seemed very capable.
Someone on June 25, root parent next [—]. The Java String and StringBuf classes have about the best combination of power and simplicity that you can get.
But then they encounter Symbian OS descriptors. Copy KFred ; I had forgot it was this bad. For the lack of a better word, development in Symbian was "tacky", was like walking on mud, everything took 10x the effort it should. It was a time when Nokia was the only game in town think N93, N95 and they thought they could get away with mistreating developers forever. Funny how they sabotaged their own efforts to make development easier e.
Python for Series 60, let alone Maemo. Some things never change.. Descriptors blew everyone's minds initially but they eventually clicked. Active Objects and the manual CleanupStack were other headaches. I vote for the threading model. I vote for the ridiculous number of different devices, screen sizes, hardware etc. Maybe the compiling times too. They made a huge mistake: not forcing their own AppStore globally.
The way to get app was by content aggregators and premium sms sites. Fnoord on June 25, prev next [—]. It is unfair to compare.
An application with an offline map is different, by design, that one where you can download the map or require a connection. Which one's used much more nowadays? What has won is capability-based design, and the fact that the review system in iOS is better but not perfect compared to Google.
The install base is also much larger though, and the amount of personal data on a smartphone has also increased greatly. The question we need to ask ourselves is the following: do we really need all this data available on our smartphone? It isn't about need, it's about want. We don't want erase all data permission. We need only very specific permissions.
Like with browser extensions I don't want access to all pages and tabs. Especially Symbian. Hacker News new past comments ask show jobs submit. Symbian Won shkspr. Apocryphon on June 26, root parent next [—] And webOS! Mandatum on June 26, root parent prev next [—] Are there any phones that allow you to customize this? QuercusMax on June 25, root parent prev next [—] I totally know what you mean - the sense of satisfaction and joy when you get even the most basic "end-to-end" functionality working in a new environment is hard to match.
Steltek on June 25, root parent next [—] Wow, thanks for that video down memory lane. AceJohnny2 on June 25, root parent next [—] It's not the 8-space I'm aghast about, but that every function body is indented by it.
SemiNormal on June 25, root parent prev next [—] Whitesmiths style is for sadists.
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