20 ms·

Symbian Won

512 points by edent 6y ago

1cvmask 6y ago
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!).
- miohtama 6y ago
  I worked in the mobile phone industry 00s. Besides terrible Series 60 UI, Symbian also had non-POSIX (micro?) kernel. 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.g. Ericsson. So Symbian was kind of Android, but no default UI and closed source.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    > Note that there were non-Symbian mobile phones as well e.g. Ericsson There were also multiple variants of Symbian - S60 was the Nokia UI, but Ericsson and Motorola had Symbian UIQ, in Japan they had MOAP-Symbian
rvz 6y ago
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.
- edent 6y ago
  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.
  - braythwayt 6y ago
    I make a similar argument when I say that “CoffeeScript was merged to main.” Yes, JavaScript 2015 won... By adopting all of the ideas that CoffeeScript made mainstream for front-end web development. I realize this is a philosophical distinction, but it really does come down to whether you are attached to the fundamental characteristic of a thing, or the label/name/brand of the thing. 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. But do we say he lost because “The Mother of All Demos” was not an Apple II or Macintosh?
  - gravitas 6y ago
    In this era I was into mobile phonery (is that a word?) and in 2006 the Nokia e50 (Symbian 9.1) was such a great phone, it went to many countries that year and I just loved it (it was maybe my 3rd Symbian). 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"). Until the end of 2006 when T-Mobile (US) introduced the BlackBerry Pearl; it was at that point Symbian/S60 died in my life when I realized how limited it was and what it could have been, haven't touched one since (the Pearl being eclipsed by the first Androids after that in 2008). They had a shot and a solid following on HowardForums and just sort of blew it and let the competition outrun them.
- bulka 6y ago
  "Everyone else did it better" - by some very loose definition of "better" maybe. Author is agreeing that Symbian failed for good reasons at the very end of a very short blog post.
- 6y ago
arpa 6y ago
I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port issues forced me to upgrade.
- Brakenshire 6y ago
  Was Maemo open source, including the shell? I wonder whether anyone will try and revive it now we have mainline kernel Linux phones, like Librem and Pinephone.
  - arpa 6y ago
    I _think_ it mostly was, with the exception of binary driver blobs. At least a few years ago it still had very active dev community at maemo.org, so it is not inconceivable for it to be revived. Alas, the neo900 project died.
    - Fnoord 6y ago
      No idea if neo900 officially died, but unofficially the timeline on the bottom and lack of news on the website [1] say as much. I believe right now you're best off with /e/ in combination with a Fairphone 3. [1] https://neo900.org https://neo900.org
      - Intermernet 6y ago
        Friends of mine were taught by Carsten Haitzler (rasterman, original author of enlightenment, lead dev of tizen) at UNSW. Back in the day enlightenment was, in many ways, miles ahead of the competition. Unfortunately it was miles ahead of the hardware as well. Apparently he has always been passionate about open source, and I've always been impressed by his output. I'd love to see /e/ get some mind share on a decent platform.
        Fnoord 6y ago
        Sorry, I could've added a link. /e/ referred to [1], not Enlightenment. [1] https://e.foundation https://e.foundation
epx 6y ago
Got depression doing Symbian development. (I am not kidding.)
- alecmg 6y ago
  not enough information was it related to symbian design choices?
  - joezydeco 6y ago
    I vote for the threading model.
    - trenchgun 6y ago
      I vote for the ridiculous number of different devices, screen sizes, hardware etc. Maybe the compiling times too.
  - Someone 6y ago
    I don’t know what the OP refers to, but using strings was ‘different’ from doing it in other systems. http://descriptors.blogspot.com/ http://descriptors.blogspot.com/: “Most programmers come to Symbian OS from some other development environment, and tend to think they’ve already got strings pretty much sussed. After all, there’s not much to C strings to understand, although there are plenty of ways they can go wrong. The Java String and StringBuf classes have about the best combination of power and simplicity that you can get. And the various String and CString classes found in different flavours of C++ environments are usually mastered fairly quickly. But then they encounter Symbian OS descriptors. If there was anything invented to bring a high flying C++ developer firmly back to ground during their first week of Symbian OS development, it’s descriptors.”
    - secondcoming 6y ago
      Ha, I still might have the introduction to symbian c++ book somewhere. Descriptors blew everyone's minds initially but they eventually clicked. Active Objects and the manual CleanupStack were other headaches.
fsckboy 6y ago
it was my impression that a lot of those Symbian warnings weren't so much trust/privacy related, but were driven simply by "european" service plans that charged a lot of money for SMS (sending) and network data, and users were hypersensitive to receiving huge phone bills. source: I used my Nokia phones internationally by swapping SIMs and there was a huge difference between US and European plans.
onli 6y ago
> Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. But that's cool with users. It's not annoying, it's more or less a one time thing, maybe a hint more if the app is a bit more unusual. The Symbian notifications? That's a "I hate you, user". Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that? On the other hand, some of those warnings made sense at the time. Mobile internet was so expensive that I never enabled it. Right up there with MMS one of the things that priced itself out of the reach of regular customers. It was like 3€ to send one single MMS, Internet was also in that domain - per Megabyte (I should note here that the country I lived in is technologically a third world country). That changed only later. So a more modern iPhone and Android could design those things differently.
- moepstar 6y ago
  >>> Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that? For whatever reason, old Internet Explorers (9? 10? not sure..) do that too...
  - jfrunyon 6y ago
    The really old ones didn't even have a "remember this choice" checkbox.
    - dcomp 6y ago
      The only thing more annoying is when it ignores the remember this site checkbox. The current ones will ignore the remember this site probably due to a stupid group policy. Possibly forgets on logoff
  - fomine3 6y ago
    IIRC latest IE11 on Windows Server 2019 still asking such stupid things by default.
Bud 6y ago
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.
- edent 6y ago
  That's not completely correct. My NEC smartphones didn't. Nor did the early BlackBerrys that I used.
  - LeonM 6y ago
    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.
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      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.
    - giobox 6y ago
      BBM absolutely did take off with youngsters for a while - I sold a lot of blackberries to teenagers in the U.K. in 06. Blackberry failed for much same reason it failed everywhere else - much better phone platforms came out very quickly etc.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    I remember SK feature phones with WAP support that did ask. 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.
  - rescbr 6y ago
ttsda 6y ago
Symbian was great! I got a used Nokia 6110 Navigator around 2008 (I was 12/13) and it was mindblowing to me. It had GPS, and I could download apps from the internet that would do stuff with the GPS and send data in real time to my computer.
marban 6y ago
I owned every generation of the Nokia 9xxx Communicator series and especially the 9500 with Symbian 7 was a joy to use. Nothing beat laying by the pool and doing a little office work on the brick.
xiconfjs 6y ago
Last Symbian phone I used was a SonyEricsson P910 (Symbian UIQ3?). I loved the on device programming - writing a script answering SMS based on content was the best.
qwerty456127 6y ago
> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started. Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnitch on Mac (I just hope it's going to keep working on ARM macs), AFWall+ and XPrivacy on Android and miss this level of control terribly on Linux (it sort of can be achieved with AppArmor or SELinux but both are nightmares to use). If only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path and other process parameters - that would be just so awesome. There was such a feature in some 2.x kernel but, sadly, it was deprecated long ago.
- messe 6y ago
  > now I use LittleSnitch on Mac (I just hope it's going to keep working on ARM macs) It should. Kexts are still allowed, for now. They're almost certainly only a couple of releases away from being deprecated though.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    From the article this HN discussion [1] links to: "We expect the deprecation to become effective with the next major release of macOS. There’s no official release date from Apple, but based on the release schedule of recent years it will not be before this fall. Little Snitch 4 will then not be loaded by the operating system, but there will still be an option to allow the loading." Little Snitch 5 (with NKE) requires a new license. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677849
    - jmull 6y ago
      > Little Snitch 5 (with NKE) requires a new license. There is reasonable pricing for upgrades... LS4 bought within a certain time get a free upgrade, older licenses get a reduced price.
  - dmd 6y ago
Fnoord 6y ago
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. Compare TomTom and Garmin with Google Maps and Apple Maps. 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? Or, put different: do you need to be able to access this data while on the go, 24/7? Do you need to take your smartphone with you 24/7?
- criddell 6y ago
  It isn't about need, it's about want.
Nextgrid 6y ago
The other problem here is the lack of regulation. It's reasonable for a non-technical person to assume that any app whose provenance is known (thanks to the App Store's policies and requiring a valid DUNS number or similar) would be investigated & punished if they end up doing something malicious, so as long as traceability can be ensured (which it is) then it must be safe. I myself used to think that as long as I use apps from a major brand (so like Facebook, Google, etc) I should be safe because there's no way they're going to pull spyware-like tricks and steal personal data... right?
ballenf 6y ago
> Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work. It requires rational people to have an educated understanding of the risks they face. Millions of people installed dodgy apps, saw the one-time prompt, and lost control of their data. Doesn't the premise of the article disprove this statement? There's been no regulatory movement forcing the "Symbian" granular permission approach. I'd argue the pseudo-regulated app stores were a bigger source of the problem, not the "libertarian free-for-all". That is, having an app store with Apple or Google's name on it is what encouraged users to let their guard down and trust all the apps on it. If you had to download the "battery charger" app from Bob's Phone Tools' site instead of the Google Play store, you'd maybe be a little more skeptical of that permissions list.
- loxs 6y ago
  And also, people usually take a people-concept and apply it to tech. "It can't work in tech, so it won't work for the market". On the contrary. Libertarianism does not forbid a company to implement whatever jailed garden it wants, so long as it does not force or lie to its customers. And the problem with the lying corporations does not come from the free market, it comes from government lobbying and protections. Regulations are only a way for the monopolists to curb competition, nothing more.
- fiatjaf 6y ago
  Exactly what I wanted to say but couldn't find the words to do. This comment is beautiful and should be read every time someone complains about "libertarianism" in such a completely misguided manner.
rbanffy 6y ago
I don't remember this "decent ecosystem for developers". Did I miss something?
matthewaveryusa 6y ago
It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
jayrwren 6y ago
I hope this is the stupidest thing that I read today.
garaetjjte 6y ago
>Symbian: Opening a secure connection. Continue? >IE6: You are about to view pages over a secure connection Why did early 2000' software had such obsession with asking user about secure connection?
- darksaints 6y ago
  More importantly, why did they ask you about secure connections, but automatically assume that insecure connections were okay?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    IIRC https/tls consumes a lot of overhead back then, both on server side and client side. 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.
  - danilocesar 6y ago
    Dark ages my friend. Luckily we know better nowadays =)
maxwellito 6y ago
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
- AgloeDreams 6y ago
  they do, the default file picker for iOS has a 'pick file' native command that then pops a system picker and then returns just the selected file but many companies would rather have full access to enable their own experience. 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.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    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.g. finding a photo from your entire camera-roll or picking contacts) the sandboxed third-party code indicates the selection to the host OS who then does a quick "confirm you want to use these 3 photos?" prompt and then releases only the selected data. ...basically something like WinRT's broker-processes on steroids - or another use case for Apple's "App Extensions" feature but allowing for complete control of the UX more akin to a Photoshop Plugin than being limited to a small number of prescribed use-cases.
  - maxwellito 6y ago
    Wow! 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. Actually the problem is most of apps don't give you the choice between [slick UX + loose control over your data] or [ok UX + perfect control of your data]. 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?
GekkePrutser 6y ago
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. So you could get your work apps to only work over WiFi, some apps always go over VPN, some always use 4G even if WiFi was active. 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.
secondcoming 6y ago
I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Network operators desperately wanted an alternative ecosystem to avoid being dependent on Android and Apple (but mainly I believe so that they could build their own walled gardens). But by the time Nokia took over Symbian it became apparent that they saw Linux as the future OS for high-end devices and Symbian was to be relegated to mid-level devices.
- franze 6y ago
  My boss at the Austria Press Agency wanted a software to distribute our news to Mobile Phones in 2004 or 5 or so. So I took a deep dive into Symbian with very limited C++ understanding. It took me at least a month to figure that that C++ is not C++ at all. In the end senior engineers, were put on it. Project went nowhere. And then came iPhone and we went down the Mobile Browser Road (years later Apps I think).
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    They adopted C++ very early on in the language's life. The standard at the time had not even specified how exceptions worked, so Symbian rolled their own (TRAP and User::Leave). But then they were stuck... breaking ABI was forbidden, so more modern C++ features couldn't be used (easily).
    - einpoklum 6y ago
      C++ was created in 1979 - I doubt Symbian adopted it "very early". Also, the standard doesn't specify "how exceptions work" even today, in the sense that a lot of what happens when running C++ is implementation dependent. But I can see what you mean about sticking to pre-C++11 (maybe even pre-C++98 ?) APIs.
alexwasserman 6y ago
When I moved from the UK to the US in early 2006 I lost my Symbian-running 6680 Nokia, because it couldn't be ported over, it was locked to a UK network and they refused to unlock it. I loved Symbian at the time, losing it took me back to the dark ages. In the UK I'd had my Nokia 6680 with front and rear cameras, unlimited 3G, multi-tasking apps, a proper web browser, the ability to install apps, and even some crap ability to watch TV. It also had a memory card for storing and playing music. I had it connected to my Powerbook (17" powerbook was my best laptop ever), and had 3G usable browsing speeds anywhere, wirelessly through bluetooth, and the phone's 3G. It synced contacts, emails, etc. Coming to the US I got the latest and greatest - a Razor. It had an OS that felt like going back to the 70s. No 3G. No camera at all. No apps or ability to use them. Contacts on the SIM with no decent data. All it could do well was text or call. Even the first iPhones were well behind the Symbian/6680 combo I'd had for a while in the UK (no 3G, no apps, no multi-tasking, no front camera), and it wasn't until the iPhone 4 in 2010 that I got the front camera back, which meant I had feature parity with what I'd had in the UK in 2005.
- zymhan 6y ago
  To be fair, it was possible to buy Windows, Palm, and Symbian phones in the US in the 2000s. I owned a few for fun, far after they were outdated. But my Nokia E51 worked amazingly, and I used it right as the iPhone was released. I then switched to a Palm Pixi :D
- jfrunyon 6y ago
  The Razr's had a camera... it might have been useless, but they did have one.
- JeremyNT 6y ago
  I was big into Symbian before iOS and Android came around, and I was incredibly excited to buy the N95, the (then) flagship phone. I purchased the US variant of the phone very shortly after its launch date from the Nokia store in NYC. This was one of the few Symbian phones to make it to American shores with our 3G bands, and at the time it was notable for having the best camera available. I loved the device, but the same year the original iPhone came out. On the spec sheet it was worse in every way - no third party apps, no 3g, etc etc. But the market spoke quickly, and the N95 became the last Nokia device I would own. I always thought it was a shame that the high end Nokia devices failed to really target the US market. Usually they were lacking key frequencies, and/or only available unlocked (without any carrier subsidies). Had Nokia been better situated here, perhaps they could have presented some real competition to the iPhone, but there was no way people were going to go specifically seek out an expensive, high end Symbian phone when AT&T had subsidized iPhones and a massive advertising blitz.
draw_down 6y ago
Somehow I imagine that Nokia had other goals with Symbian than “increase the number of dialogs in mobile applications”. Like, they probably wanted to sell a lot of phones. Just guessing!
mwcampbell 6y ago
A truly sane platform would use capability-based security with a Powerbox UI, as Sandstorm does: https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-06-10-network-access-permission-android-vs-sandstorm https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-06-10-network-access-permissi...
TheRealPomax 6y ago
This kind of reads like the exact counter-point to the title: Symbian was doing the right thing, but in such a horrible fashion that ios and android were able to capitalise on "we offer less friction" at the expensive of what history has shown we had to pay for that convience. And history equally shoes we collectively quite happily did?
dangus 6y ago
I think the connection this article is trying to make is sort of a stretch. The way modern iOS and Android handles asking for permissions doesn’t seem all that similar to me. Symbian was asking about network connectivity because, at the time, mobile phone networks charged for data in ridiculously small increments at high prices. One of Apple’s biggest innovations was to convince Cingular to sell an unlimited data plan at a price acceptable to the general consumer and not just for businesses. If I recall correctly, there was a good period of time where BlackBerry service plans cost more than the iPhone by 10 or 20 dollars per month, and yet a BlackBerry really didn’t have a fast/usable enough web browser to even consume as much data. The iPhone was so popular that it was bringing Cingular’s network to its knees, especially during sports events and things like that.
bayindirh 6y ago
People didn't like Symbian and PalmOS when shinier alternatives came out but, these two OSes did a lot fundamental things correctly and efficiently. The iOS lockscreen is a modernized version of the Today app from PalmOS. Current iOS homescreen is a slightly modified version of PalmOS homescreen to be precise. PalmOS and Symbian are the pioneers of mobile OSes and they were pretty good at that.
jokit 6y ago
>Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work. This is calling the cure "the disease", and vice versa. The author doesn't mention a libertarian free-for-all among the alternatives. A free market innovates at the edges in all directions in a decentralized fashion. It may take longer to address certain demands than a centralized, top down, approach. However, it is only a truly libertarian, truly free market, that allows for any individual empowerment. The proprietary "options" that turn you into their product, rather than produce a product/service for you, aren't going to free you from them. Other free individuals will by sharing their open source alternatives. It may take longer, but it is solved. Usually the proprietary alternatives than make "improvements" that are largely just meant to break an open source solution, but this is a temporary sabotage at best. What they really need is to trick people into believing that the disease is the cure... or, that government protects people from monopolies, rather than the truth, that they enable them. Imagine computers without open source. Just how impressive would Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc., be? They "innovate" as much as is necessary to protect their market share. If they can bribe government into eliminating competition with a cut of their monopolistic loot, some will do that too. Whatever the least expensive/most profitable path is. Why do people create and share open source solutions? What is their motive?
Tade0 6y ago
I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. I don't know about Sagem, but NEC is alive and kicking. Its glory days of the 80s are very much over, but they managed to stay on the market.
einpoklum 6y ago
> With the latest releases of Android and iOS ... Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. But what about _Google_ or _Apple_ accessing my data? I can't prevent that, and they're some of the dodgiest corporation with the dodgiest apps in terms of privacy - after all, we know they send your data to the NSA.
pydry 6y ago
I don't really understand why setting up permissions for apps are seemingly so hard get right for Android and apple. It's not complicated at all yet they fuck it up endlessly. It seems screamingly obvious that I might want to give apps access to some of my files but not all of my files. Some of my contacts but not all of my contacts. No such options exist. Many other permissions are also needlessly coarse grained for no particularly good reason. I probably want to see apps flagged which ask for permissions which are ridiculous given what they do and justifications from developers. Not possible. These things aren't intrinsically hard at all.
- loxs 6y ago
  It's not hard per se. It's hard to do correctly only when you side with the advertisers' interests.
cletus 6y ago
I like the screenshot in this post about the permissions Android apps ask for. At least this matches my experience. Android apps by and large just ask for everything so it's a choice between giving them everything or not being able to use them. Apple OTOH does two major things different: 1. Apple's approach is to ask for individual permissions it needs when it first needs them. I can't overstate how much better this is than the Android all-or-nothing permission dialog. 2. Apple's permissions make more sense to users. Things like: - Your location - Run in background - Your contacts - Your photos - The camera Android's permissions always struck me as what engineers would do if they designed a permission system. > Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work. TRUE. Big true. Honestly though I don't really see the author's point. I don't see iOS 14 and whatever the next Android version is to be back to what Symbian did.
- danans 6y ago
  Android has prescribed apps to request individual permissions at runtime since Android 6.0 (released in 2015): https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requestin... iOS switched to the runtime permission request in iOS 6 (released in 2012), so they switched earlier than Android, but both platforms have had runtime permissions requests for years.
jokoon 6y ago
I still have my nokia c2-01. It works fine, it stills takes picture, and it's 9 years old. The battery last for about 1 week or less. I do calls with a 2 euro/month plan. 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 know there's the pinephone, but I would rather have more limited, slower/cheaper hardware instead.
- 6510 6y ago
  I really liked Viktors amazing 4 bit processor http://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/13-4-bit-processor/134-viktors-amazing-4-bit-processor-architecture http://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/13-4-bit-proces...
alex_young 6y ago
Except your apps are all built using SDKs that sell your data to the highest bidder and even if that can be mitigated, your cell company is doing the same thing on the network level. They just brought back the illusion of control.
6510 6y ago
We don't want erase all data permission. We need only very specific permissions. We should have custom permissions that we can get certified/approved. Like with browser extensions I don't want access to all pages and tabs. I want [say] access to the `href` attribute `value` of the `link` elements that have attribute `rel` that is `alternate` AND `type` that is either `application/rss+xml` OR `application/atom+xml` To be described to the user as: "Permission to discover RSS and Atom feeds." I pay 25 euro, I wait, the platform ppl sign of on it, I update the tool with the new permission.
webwielder2 6y ago
Or from another, more accurate, perspective, Symbian didn't win.
aleken 6y ago
J2ME also asked about permissions for everything. Miss that!
postfacto 6y ago
So in 2003, before the iPhone came out, I was a mac developer doing Cocoa/Objective-C development. I then tried to learn Symbian and I found the IDE hard to setup, the API was hard to learn, and I believe it only ran on windows. At the time I thought to myself “the NeXT/Cocoa API and utilities are so awesome, so easy, so mature that if Apple ever makes it possible to write mobile apps with them, they are totally going to absolutely destroy everyone else in the mobile development marketplace. Especially Symbian.”
jillesvangurp 6y ago
I worked for Nokia between 2005-2012. During that time, roughly, it managed itself into its own eventual demise. Symbian, it's technical limitations, and general many spots across senior management for the types of qualities actually valued by users kind of set the stage for both Apple and Google to come in and disrupt the market with an initially remarkably mediocre effort: it didn't take much to disrupt the train wreck that was Symbian. The first IOS versions had quite a few limitations and a long list of stuff that it basically did not have at all. Yet it was better in only two ways: - it had a well thought out UX; users loved that - it did not crash all the time and wasn't riddled with bugs; unlike just about anything that Nokia shipped. There was a long list of stuff Symbian could technically do but sucked so hard at that few users actually bothered with using those things. Like using the web, taking photos and sharing them with friends, or doing some video conferencing. Technically you could do all those things but it was a combination of painfully awkward to do, unusable and extremely likely in your phone resetting randomly. All that was probably fixable technically but none of that was something Nokia was able to actually pull off due to it's management structure, priorities, and a general complete vacuum at the top in terms of leadership and vision. Looking back, Nokia's bad decision making started around the time Linux became an obvious future choice for phones (late nineties) and just a few years ago before a tiny startup called Android actually started dreaming of making a linux & Java based phone. Instead Nokia ignored the signs of the time (and the many embedded hardware manufacturers experimenting with linux) and went for a little known 32 bit successor to 16 bit OS from the nineteen eighties and threw its weight behind it. Google bought Android around the same time Apple kicked it's IOS efforts into gear, which was around the time I joined Nokia and also around the time Nokia Symbian phones actually started shipping in more meaningful volume (it was late and not great initially). Symbian was not what made Nokia rich. That was actually two other platforms called S30 and S40. The S here is often confused for Symbian but actually means Series. Series 30 dates back to the early nineties and still ships in some volume in developing markets for a few dollars. That infamous indestructible Nokia phone that always comes up in Nokia nostalgia? S30. Snake, Calls, and SMS. All it did. (OK and a little WAP if you got any value out of that walled garden). S40 started shipping around 1999 (the flip phone in the Matrix was the first model). Initially with black and white screens. Later with color screens, multi media capabilities, etc. This was the backbone of Nokia's revenue right until MS came in. Not Symbian either and actually kind of a cool OS design for its time. Only Series 60, 80, and 90 were actually Symbian based. Nokia did not actually start shipping Symbian in volume until about 2004/2005, right when it's competition was basically going from prototype to eventual reality at Apple & Google. The e-series phones (the ones with qwerty keyboards) were popular but comparatively a niche market. Initially that was S80 (the business variant) and later the two remaining Nokia Symbian platforms merged and S60 became the only version (initially this was positioned for multi media and gaming devices). Technically all of these were UI layers on top of Symbian. Ericsson had its own version called UIQ. There were a quite a few flagship S60 phones that were basically variations of candy bars until after the iphone shipped. Nokia actually killed off S90 in 2005 which was intended as a touchscreen variant. Yep, that's the same year Google bought Android and Apple was moving ahead with IOS. And, yes, Nokia was well aware of those two facts (very much a public secret at the time). For the next 3 years the only touch screen devices Nokia sold were Linux based. Only in 2007 Nokia woke up and went "oh F*" and gobbled together a company killing version of a touch screen phone on top of S60. I can't emphasize how rushed and how bad this was. Especially considering it had a perfectly good shipping Linux tablet running basically the same kernel as what later became Android. It spent the next five years convincing consumers how much S60 didn't suck while failing repeatedly and hard. Especially a few years after Apple ate their lunch it became increasingly painful to watch. Lots of desperate moves happened during that time. Fun fact, Nokia shipped an internet tablet running Debian Linux with X, GTK and a Mozilla Gecko based browser around 2006, almost half a decade before the ipad shipped. This thing was awesome and the reasons for it shipping without phone capabilities were entirely political and non technical (think management having a hard-on for Symbian). This little tablet eventually became a phone and then the whole MS thing happened. Meanwhile Google bought a lot of these because it basically ran the same kernel and drivers as early versions of Android and you could dual boot them to whatever; which was a nice feature to have before they shipped the first Nexus phone. Nokia basically helped bootstrap Android but was too occupied moving deck chairs around on the sinking ship that was Symbian. So, no, Symbian did not win.
matt2000 6y ago
> "Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work." But isn't that how the Internet works? No one "approves" a website for release.
- glosses 6y ago
  Right, but browsers are "regulated". The attack surface that a website has against a user is much smaller than what an app has. Or at least was, I think websites and apps are converging now.
jbverschoor 6y ago
No they didn’t. They made a huge mistake: not forcing their own AppStore globally. The way to get app was by content aggregators and premium sms sites. Developers were lucky if they got 10% of the purchase price. So please people, stop complaining about 30% for discovery, security checks, big number of payment methods, tax-consolidation, and global availability.
Hnrobert42 6y ago
I love the word snaffle now.
shmerl 6y ago
Nokia had a chance with Meego. But internal politics killed it, and Symbain followed.
cdbattags 6y ago
I believe this is the same reason why https://hey.com https://hey.com will win too. Product engineering where the app/service is one big A/B test is how you truly figure out what your users want and need.
mathgladiator 6y ago
I think a better title would have been "Symbian did it right first!" and this then illustrates that doing things wrong were about priorities, and a better focus for user-focus was the winning play by others.
bglusman 6y ago
Being too early is the same as being wrong.
ineedasername 6y ago
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.
npunt 6y ago
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. But to launch a category defining smartphone, that limitation needed to be broken entirely, and that involves work outside of software; namely, timing the launch such that you can negotiate with AT&T to ease the data restriction. 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. I've written more about this type of dynamic here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
randyrand 6y ago
Mostly decent article, but one point - Android is hardly a libertarian free for all. Google controls the way apps must ask for permission. If anything it shows that with just a single choice and no competition, android apps just all have to do the same shity thing. Opposite of libertarian.
beamatronic 6y ago
Sybian is a great product. It works well, but is a little expensive.
qserasera 6y ago
You can’t really manage your data if you don’t include your service providers

512 points by edent 6y ago

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!).

miohtama 6y ago
I worked in the mobile phone industry 00s. Besides terrible Series 60 UI, Symbian also had non-POSIX (micro?) kernel. 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.g. Ericsson. So Symbian was kind of Android, but no default UI and closed source.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  > Note that there were non-Symbian mobile phones as well e.g. Ericsson There were also multiple variants of Symbian - S60 was the Nokia UI, but Ericsson and Motorola had Symbian UIQ, in Japan they had MOAP-Symbian

rvz 6y ago

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.

edent 6y ago
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.
- braythwayt 6y ago
  I make a similar argument when I say that “CoffeeScript was merged to main.” Yes, JavaScript 2015 won... By adopting all of the ideas that CoffeeScript made mainstream for front-end web development. I realize this is a philosophical distinction, but it really does come down to whether you are attached to the fundamental characteristic of a thing, or the label/name/brand of the thing. 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. But do we say he lost because “The Mother of All Demos” was not an Apple II or Macintosh?
- gravitas 6y ago
  In this era I was into mobile phonery (is that a word?) and in 2006 the Nokia e50 (Symbian 9.1) was such a great phone, it went to many countries that year and I just loved it (it was maybe my 3rd Symbian). 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"). Until the end of 2006 when T-Mobile (US) introduced the BlackBerry Pearl; it was at that point Symbian/S60 died in my life when I realized how limited it was and what it could have been, haven't touched one since (the Pearl being eclipsed by the first Androids after that in 2008). They had a shot and a solid following on HowardForums and just sort of blew it and let the competition outrun them.
bulka 6y ago
"Everyone else did it better" - by some very loose definition of "better" maybe. Author is agreeing that Symbian failed for good reasons at the very end of a very short blog post.
6y ago

arpa 6y ago

I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port issues forced me to upgrade.

Brakenshire 6y ago
Was Maemo open source, including the shell? I wonder whether anyone will try and revive it now we have mainline kernel Linux phones, like Librem and Pinephone.
- arpa 6y ago
  I _think_ it mostly was, with the exception of binary driver blobs. At least a few years ago it still had very active dev community at maemo.org, so it is not inconceivable for it to be revived. Alas, the neo900 project died.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    No idea if neo900 officially died, but unofficially the timeline on the bottom and lack of news on the website [1] say as much. I believe right now you're best off with /e/ in combination with a Fairphone 3. [1] https://neo900.org https://neo900.org
    - Intermernet 6y ago
      Friends of mine were taught by Carsten Haitzler (rasterman, original author of enlightenment, lead dev of tizen) at UNSW. Back in the day enlightenment was, in many ways, miles ahead of the competition. Unfortunately it was miles ahead of the hardware as well. Apparently he has always been passionate about open source, and I've always been impressed by his output. I'd love to see /e/ get some mind share on a decent platform.
      - Fnoord 6y ago
        Sorry, I could've added a link. /e/ referred to [1], not Enlightenment. [1] https://e.foundation https://e.foundation

epx 6y ago

Got depression doing Symbian development. (I am not kidding.)

alecmg 6y ago
not enough information was it related to symbian design choices?
- joezydeco 6y ago
  I vote for the threading model.
  - trenchgun 6y ago
    I vote for the ridiculous number of different devices, screen sizes, hardware etc. Maybe the compiling times too.
- Someone 6y ago
  I don’t know what the OP refers to, but using strings was ‘different’ from doing it in other systems. http://descriptors.blogspot.com/ http://descriptors.blogspot.com/: “Most programmers come to Symbian OS from some other development environment, and tend to think they’ve already got strings pretty much sussed. After all, there’s not much to C strings to understand, although there are plenty of ways they can go wrong. The Java String and StringBuf classes have about the best combination of power and simplicity that you can get. And the various String and CString classes found in different flavours of C++ environments are usually mastered fairly quickly. But then they encounter Symbian OS descriptors. If there was anything invented to bring a high flying C++ developer firmly back to ground during their first week of Symbian OS development, it’s descriptors.”
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    Ha, I still might have the introduction to symbian c++ book somewhere. Descriptors blew everyone's minds initially but they eventually clicked. Active Objects and the manual CleanupStack were other headaches.

fsckboy 6y ago

it was my impression that a lot of those Symbian warnings weren't so much trust/privacy related, but were driven simply by "european" service plans that charged a lot of money for SMS (sending) and network data, and users were hypersensitive to receiving huge phone bills. source: I used my Nokia phones internationally by swapping SIMs and there was a huge difference between US and European plans.

onli 6y ago

> Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. But that's cool with users. It's not annoying, it's more or less a one time thing, maybe a hint more if the app is a bit more unusual. The Symbian notifications? That's a "I hate you, user". Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that? On the other hand, some of those warnings made sense at the time. Mobile internet was so expensive that I never enabled it. Right up there with MMS one of the things that priced itself out of the reach of regular customers. It was like 3€ to send one single MMS, Internet was also in that domain - per Megabyte (I should note here that the country I lived in is technologically a third world country). That changed only later. So a more modern iPhone and Android could design those things differently.

moepstar 6y ago
>>> Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that? For whatever reason, old Internet Explorers (9? 10? not sure..) do that too...
- jfrunyon 6y ago
  The really old ones didn't even have a "remember this choice" checkbox.
  - dcomp 6y ago
    The only thing more annoying is when it ignores the remember this site checkbox. The current ones will ignore the remember this site probably due to a stupid group policy. Possibly forgets on logoff
- fomine3 6y ago
  IIRC latest IE11 on Windows Server 2019 still asking such stupid things by default.

Bud 6y ago

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.

edent 6y ago
That's not completely correct. My NEC smartphones didn't. Nor did the early BlackBerrys that I used.
- LeonM 6y ago
  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.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    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.
  - giobox 6y ago
    BBM absolutely did take off with youngsters for a while - I sold a lot of blackberries to teenagers in the U.K. in 06. Blackberry failed for much same reason it failed everywhere else - much better phone platforms came out very quickly etc.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  I remember SK feature phones with WAP support that did ask. 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.
- rescbr 6y ago

ttsda 6y ago

Symbian was great! I got a used Nokia 6110 Navigator around 2008 (I was 12/13) and it was mindblowing to me. It had GPS, and I could download apps from the internet that would do stuff with the GPS and send data in real time to my computer.

marban 6y ago

I owned every generation of the Nokia 9xxx Communicator series and especially the 9500 with Symbian 7 was a joy to use. Nothing beat laying by the pool and doing a little office work on the brick.

xiconfjs 6y ago

Last Symbian phone I used was a SonyEricsson P910 (Symbian UIQ3?). I loved the on device programming - writing a script answering SMS based on content was the best.

qwerty456127 6y ago

> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started. Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnitch on Mac (I just hope it's going to keep working on ARM macs), AFWall+ and XPrivacy on Android and miss this level of control terribly on Linux (it sort of can be achieved with AppArmor or SELinux but both are nightmares to use). If only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path and other process parameters - that would be just so awesome. There was such a feature in some 2.x kernel but, sadly, it was deprecated long ago.

messe 6y ago
> now I use LittleSnitch on Mac (I just hope it's going to keep working on ARM macs) It should. Kexts are still allowed, for now. They're almost certainly only a couple of releases away from being deprecated though.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  From the article this HN discussion [1] links to: "We expect the deprecation to become effective with the next major release of macOS. There’s no official release date from Apple, but based on the release schedule of recent years it will not be before this fall. Little Snitch 4 will then not be loaded by the operating system, but there will still be an option to allow the loading." Little Snitch 5 (with NKE) requires a new license. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677849
  - jmull 6y ago
    > Little Snitch 5 (with NKE) requires a new license. There is reasonable pricing for upgrades... LS4 bought within a certain time get a free upgrade, older licenses get a reduced price.
- dmd 6y ago

Fnoord 6y ago

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. Compare TomTom and Garmin with Google Maps and Apple Maps. 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? Or, put different: do you need to be able to access this data while on the go, 24/7? Do you need to take your smartphone with you 24/7?

criddell 6y ago
It isn't about need, it's about want.

Nextgrid 6y ago

The other problem here is the lack of regulation. It's reasonable for a non-technical person to assume that any app whose provenance is known (thanks to the App Store's policies and requiring a valid DUNS number or similar) would be investigated & punished if they end up doing something malicious, so as long as traceability can be ensured (which it is) then it must be safe. I myself used to think that as long as I use apps from a major brand (so like Facebook, Google, etc) I should be safe because there's no way they're going to pull spyware-like tricks and steal personal data... right?

ballenf 6y ago

> Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work. It requires rational people to have an educated understanding of the risks they face. Millions of people installed dodgy apps, saw the one-time prompt, and lost control of their data. Doesn't the premise of the article disprove this statement? There's been no regulatory movement forcing the "Symbian" granular permission approach. I'd argue the pseudo-regulated app stores were a bigger source of the problem, not the "libertarian free-for-all". That is, having an app store with Apple or Google's name on it is what encouraged users to let their guard down and trust all the apps on it. If you had to download the "battery charger" app from Bob's Phone Tools' site instead of the Google Play store, you'd maybe be a little more skeptical of that permissions list.

loxs 6y ago
And also, people usually take a people-concept and apply it to tech. "It can't work in tech, so it won't work for the market". On the contrary. Libertarianism does not forbid a company to implement whatever jailed garden it wants, so long as it does not force or lie to its customers. And the problem with the lying corporations does not come from the free market, it comes from government lobbying and protections. Regulations are only a way for the monopolists to curb competition, nothing more.
fiatjaf 6y ago
Exactly what I wanted to say but couldn't find the words to do. This comment is beautiful and should be read every time someone complains about "libertarianism" in such a completely misguided manner.

rbanffy 6y ago

I don't remember this "decent ecosystem for developers". Did I miss something?

matthewaveryusa 6y ago

It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

jayrwren 6y ago

I hope this is the stupidest thing that I read today.

garaetjjte 6y ago

>Symbian: Opening a secure connection. Continue? >IE6: You are about to view pages over a secure connection Why did early 2000' software had such obsession with asking user about secure connection?

darksaints 6y ago
More importantly, why did they ask you about secure connections, but automatically assume that insecure connections were okay?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  IIRC https/tls consumes a lot of overhead back then, both on server side and client side. 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.
- danilocesar 6y ago
  Dark ages my friend. Luckily we know better nowadays =)

maxwellito 6y ago

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

AgloeDreams 6y ago
they do, the default file picker for iOS has a 'pick file' native command that then pops a system picker and then returns just the selected file but many companies would rather have full access to enable their own experience. 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  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.g. finding a photo from your entire camera-roll or picking contacts) the sandboxed third-party code indicates the selection to the host OS who then does a quick "confirm you want to use these 3 photos?" prompt and then releases only the selected data. ...basically something like WinRT's broker-processes on steroids - or another use case for Apple's "App Extensions" feature but allowing for complete control of the UX more akin to a Photoshop Plugin than being limited to a small number of prescribed use-cases.
- maxwellito 6y ago
  Wow! 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. Actually the problem is most of apps don't give you the choice between [slick UX + loose control over your data] or [ok UX + perfect control of your data]. 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?

GekkePrutser 6y ago

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. So you could get your work apps to only work over WiFi, some apps always go over VPN, some always use 4G even if WiFi was active. 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.

secondcoming 6y ago

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Network operators desperately wanted an alternative ecosystem to avoid being dependent on Android and Apple (but mainly I believe so that they could build their own walled gardens). But by the time Nokia took over Symbian it became apparent that they saw Linux as the future OS for high-end devices and Symbian was to be relegated to mid-level devices.

franze 6y ago
My boss at the Austria Press Agency wanted a software to distribute our news to Mobile Phones in 2004 or 5 or so. So I took a deep dive into Symbian with very limited C++ understanding. It took me at least a month to figure that that C++ is not C++ at all. In the end senior engineers, were put on it. Project went nowhere. And then came iPhone and we went down the Mobile Browser Road (years later Apps I think).
- secondcoming 6y ago
  They adopted C++ very early on in the language's life. The standard at the time had not even specified how exceptions worked, so Symbian rolled their own (TRAP and User::Leave). But then they were stuck... breaking ABI was forbidden, so more modern C++ features couldn't be used (easily).
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    C++ was created in 1979 - I doubt Symbian adopted it "very early". Also, the standard doesn't specify "how exceptions work" even today, in the sense that a lot of what happens when running C++ is implementation dependent. But I can see what you mean about sticking to pre-C++11 (maybe even pre-C++98 ?) APIs.

alexwasserman 6y ago

When I moved from the UK to the US in early 2006 I lost my Symbian-running 6680 Nokia, because it couldn't be ported over, it was locked to a UK network and they refused to unlock it. I loved Symbian at the time, losing it took me back to the dark ages. In the UK I'd had my Nokia 6680 with front and rear cameras, unlimited 3G, multi-tasking apps, a proper web browser, the ability to install apps, and even some crap ability to watch TV. It also had a memory card for storing and playing music. I had it connected to my Powerbook (17" powerbook was my best laptop ever), and had 3G usable browsing speeds anywhere, wirelessly through bluetooth, and the phone's 3G. It synced contacts, emails, etc. Coming to the US I got the latest and greatest - a Razor. It had an OS that felt like going back to the 70s. No 3G. No camera at all. No apps or ability to use them. Contacts on the SIM with no decent data. All it could do well was text or call. Even the first iPhones were well behind the Symbian/6680 combo I'd had for a while in the UK (no 3G, no apps, no multi-tasking, no front camera), and it wasn't until the iPhone 4 in 2010 that I got the front camera back, which meant I had feature parity with what I'd had in the UK in 2005.

zymhan 6y ago
To be fair, it was possible to buy Windows, Palm, and Symbian phones in the US in the 2000s. I owned a few for fun, far after they were outdated. But my Nokia E51 worked amazingly, and I used it right as the iPhone was released. I then switched to a Palm Pixi :D
jfrunyon 6y ago
The Razr's had a camera... it might have been useless, but they did have one.
JeremyNT 6y ago
I was big into Symbian before iOS and Android came around, and I was incredibly excited to buy the N95, the (then) flagship phone. I purchased the US variant of the phone very shortly after its launch date from the Nokia store in NYC. This was one of the few Symbian phones to make it to American shores with our 3G bands, and at the time it was notable for having the best camera available. I loved the device, but the same year the original iPhone came out. On the spec sheet it was worse in every way - no third party apps, no 3g, etc etc. But the market spoke quickly, and the N95 became the last Nokia device I would own. I always thought it was a shame that the high end Nokia devices failed to really target the US market. Usually they were lacking key frequencies, and/or only available unlocked (without any carrier subsidies). Had Nokia been better situated here, perhaps they could have presented some real competition to the iPhone, but there was no way people were going to go specifically seek out an expensive, high end Symbian phone when AT&T had subsidized iPhones and a massive advertising blitz.

draw_down 6y ago

Somehow I imagine that Nokia had other goals with Symbian than “increase the number of dialogs in mobile applications”. Like, they probably wanted to sell a lot of phones. Just guessing!

mwcampbell 6y ago

A truly sane platform would use capability-based security with a Powerbox UI, as Sandstorm does: https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-06-10-network-access-permission-android-vs-sandstorm https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-06-10-network-access-permissi...

TheRealPomax 6y ago

This kind of reads like the exact counter-point to the title: Symbian was doing the right thing, but in such a horrible fashion that ios and android were able to capitalise on "we offer less friction" at the expensive of what history has shown we had to pay for that convience. And history equally shoes we collectively quite happily did?

dangus 6y ago

I think the connection this article is trying to make is sort of a stretch. The way modern iOS and Android handles asking for permissions doesn’t seem all that similar to me. Symbian was asking about network connectivity because, at the time, mobile phone networks charged for data in ridiculously small increments at high prices. One of Apple’s biggest innovations was to convince Cingular to sell an unlimited data plan at a price acceptable to the general consumer and not just for businesses. If I recall correctly, there was a good period of time where BlackBerry service plans cost more than the iPhone by 10 or 20 dollars per month, and yet a BlackBerry really didn’t have a fast/usable enough web browser to even consume as much data. The iPhone was so popular that it was bringing Cingular’s network to its knees, especially during sports events and things like that.

bayindirh 6y ago

People didn't like Symbian and PalmOS when shinier alternatives came out but, these two OSes did a lot fundamental things correctly and efficiently. The iOS lockscreen is a modernized version of the Today app from PalmOS. Current iOS homescreen is a slightly modified version of PalmOS homescreen to be precise. PalmOS and Symbian are the pioneers of mobile OSes and they were pretty good at that.

jokit 6y ago

>Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work. This is calling the cure "the disease", and vice versa. The author doesn't mention a libertarian free-for-all among the alternatives. A free market innovates at the edges in all directions in a decentralized fashion. It may take longer to address certain demands than a centralized, top down, approach. However, it is only a truly libertarian, truly free market, that allows for any individual empowerment. The proprietary "options" that turn you into their product, rather than produce a product/service for you, aren't going to free you from them. Other free individuals will by sharing their open source alternatives. It may take longer, but it is solved. Usually the proprietary alternatives than make "improvements" that are largely just meant to break an open source solution, but this is a temporary sabotage at best. What they really need is to trick people into believing that the disease is the cure... or, that government protects people from monopolies, rather than the truth, that they enable them. Imagine computers without open source. Just how impressive would Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc., be? They "innovate" as much as is necessary to protect their market share. If they can bribe government into eliminating competition with a cut of their monopolistic loot, some will do that too. Whatever the least expensive/most profitable path is. Why do people create and share open source solutions? What is their motive?

Tade0 6y ago

I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. I don't know about Sagem, but NEC is alive and kicking. Its glory days of the 80s are very much over, but they managed to stay on the market.

einpoklum 6y ago

> With the latest releases of Android and iOS ... Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. But what about _Google_ or _Apple_ accessing my data? I can't prevent that, and they're some of the dodgiest corporation with the dodgiest apps in terms of privacy - after all, we know they send your data to the NSA.

pydry 6y ago

I don't really understand why setting up permissions for apps are seemingly so hard get right for Android and apple. It's not complicated at all yet they fuck it up endlessly. It seems screamingly obvious that I might want to give apps access to some of my files but not all of my files. Some of my contacts but not all of my contacts. No such options exist. Many other permissions are also needlessly coarse grained for no particularly good reason. I probably want to see apps flagged which ask for permissions which are ridiculous given what they do and justifications from developers. Not possible. These things aren't intrinsically hard at all.

loxs 6y ago
It's not hard per se. It's hard to do correctly only when you side with the advertisers' interests.

cletus 6y ago

I like the screenshot in this post about the permissions Android apps ask for. At least this matches my experience. Android apps by and large just ask for everything so it's a choice between giving them everything or not being able to use them. Apple OTOH does two major things different: 1. Apple's approach is to ask for individual permissions it needs when it first needs them. I can't overstate how much better this is than the Android all-or-nothing permission dialog. 2. Apple's permissions make more sense to users. Things like: - Your location - Run in background - Your contacts - Your photos - The camera Android's permissions always struck me as what engineers would do if they designed a permission system. > Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work. TRUE. Big true. Honestly though I don't really see the author's point. I don't see iOS 14 and whatever the next Android version is to be back to what Symbian did.

danans 6y ago
Android has prescribed apps to request individual permissions at runtime since Android 6.0 (released in 2015): https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requestin... iOS switched to the runtime permission request in iOS 6 (released in 2012), so they switched earlier than Android, but both platforms have had runtime permissions requests for years.

jokoon 6y ago

I still have my nokia c2-01. It works fine, it stills takes picture, and it's 9 years old. The battery last for about 1 week or less. I do calls with a 2 euro/month plan. 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 know there's the pinephone, but I would rather have more limited, slower/cheaper hardware instead.

6510 6y ago
I really liked Viktors amazing 4 bit processor http://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/13-4-bit-processor/134-viktors-amazing-4-bit-processor-architecture http://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/13-4-bit-proces...

alex_young 6y ago

Except your apps are all built using SDKs that sell your data to the highest bidder and even if that can be mitigated, your cell company is doing the same thing on the network level. They just brought back the illusion of control.

6510 6y ago

We don't want erase all data permission. We need only very specific permissions. We should have custom permissions that we can get certified/approved. Like with browser extensions I don't want access to all pages and tabs. I want [say] access to the `href` attribute `value` of the `link` elements that have attribute `rel` that is `alternate` AND `type` that is either `application/rss+xml` OR `application/atom+xml` To be described to the user as: "Permission to discover RSS and Atom feeds." I pay 25 euro, I wait, the platform ppl sign of on it, I update the tool with the new permission.

webwielder2 6y ago

Or from another, more accurate, perspective, Symbian didn't win.

aleken 6y ago

J2ME also asked about permissions for everything. Miss that!

postfacto 6y ago

So in 2003, before the iPhone came out, I was a mac developer doing Cocoa/Objective-C development. I then tried to learn Symbian and I found the IDE hard to setup, the API was hard to learn, and I believe it only ran on windows. At the time I thought to myself “the NeXT/Cocoa API and utilities are so awesome, so easy, so mature that if Apple ever makes it possible to write mobile apps with them, they are totally going to absolutely destroy everyone else in the mobile development marketplace. Especially Symbian.”

jillesvangurp 6y ago

I worked for Nokia between 2005-2012. During that time, roughly, it managed itself into its own eventual demise. Symbian, it's technical limitations, and general many spots across senior management for the types of qualities actually valued by users kind of set the stage for both Apple and Google to come in and disrupt the market with an initially remarkably mediocre effort: it didn't take much to disrupt the train wreck that was Symbian. The first IOS versions had quite a few limitations and a long list of stuff that it basically did not have at all. Yet it was better in only two ways: - it had a well thought out UX; users loved that - it did not crash all the time and wasn't riddled with bugs; unlike just about anything that Nokia shipped. There was a long list of stuff Symbian could technically do but sucked so hard at that few users actually bothered with using those things. Like using the web, taking photos and sharing them with friends, or doing some video conferencing. Technically you could do all those things but it was a combination of painfully awkward to do, unusable and extremely likely in your phone resetting randomly. All that was probably fixable technically but none of that was something Nokia was able to actually pull off due to it's management structure, priorities, and a general complete vacuum at the top in terms of leadership and vision. Looking back, Nokia's bad decision making started around the time Linux became an obvious future choice for phones (late nineties) and just a few years ago before a tiny startup called Android actually started dreaming of making a linux & Java based phone. Instead Nokia ignored the signs of the time (and the many embedded hardware manufacturers experimenting with linux) and went for a little known 32 bit successor to 16 bit OS from the nineteen eighties and threw its weight behind it. Google bought Android around the same time Apple kicked it's IOS efforts into gear, which was around the time I joined Nokia and also around the time Nokia Symbian phones actually started shipping in more meaningful volume (it was late and not great initially). Symbian was not what made Nokia rich. That was actually two other platforms called S30 and S40. The S here is often confused for Symbian but actually means Series. Series 30 dates back to the early nineties and still ships in some volume in developing markets for a few dollars. That infamous indestructible Nokia phone that always comes up in Nokia nostalgia? S30. Snake, Calls, and SMS. All it did. (OK and a little WAP if you got any value out of that walled garden). S40 started shipping around 1999 (the flip phone in the Matrix was the first model). Initially with black and white screens. Later with color screens, multi media capabilities, etc. This was the backbone of Nokia's revenue right until MS came in. Not Symbian either and actually kind of a cool OS design for its time. Only Series 60, 80, and 90 were actually Symbian based. Nokia did not actually start shipping Symbian in volume until about 2004/2005, right when it's competition was basically going from prototype to eventual reality at Apple & Google. The e-series phones (the ones with qwerty keyboards) were popular but comparatively a niche market. Initially that was S80 (the business variant) and later the two remaining Nokia Symbian platforms merged and S60 became the only version (initially this was positioned for multi media and gaming devices). Technically all of these were UI layers on top of Symbian. Ericsson had its own version called UIQ. There were a quite a few flagship S60 phones that were basically variations of candy bars until after the iphone shipped. Nokia actually killed off S90 in 2005 which was intended as a touchscreen variant. Yep, that's the same year Google bought Android and Apple was moving ahead with IOS. And, yes, Nokia was well aware of those two facts (very much a public secret at the time). For the next 3 years the only touch screen devices Nokia sold were Linux based. Only in 2007 Nokia woke up and went "oh F*" and gobbled together a company killing version of a touch screen phone on top of S60. I can't emphasize how rushed and how bad this was. Especially considering it had a perfectly good shipping Linux tablet running basically the same kernel as what later became Android. It spent the next five years convincing consumers how much S60 didn't suck while failing repeatedly and hard. Especially a few years after Apple ate their lunch it became increasingly painful to watch. Lots of desperate moves happened during that time. Fun fact, Nokia shipped an internet tablet running Debian Linux with X, GTK and a Mozilla Gecko based browser around 2006, almost half a decade before the ipad shipped. This thing was awesome and the reasons for it shipping without phone capabilities were entirely political and non technical (think management having a hard-on for Symbian). This little tablet eventually became a phone and then the whole MS thing happened. Meanwhile Google bought a lot of these because it basically ran the same kernel and drivers as early versions of Android and you could dual boot them to whatever; which was a nice feature to have before they shipped the first Nexus phone. Nokia basically helped bootstrap Android but was too occupied moving deck chairs around on the sinking ship that was Symbian. So, no, Symbian did not win.

matt2000 6y ago

> "Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work." But isn't that how the Internet works? No one "approves" a website for release.

glosses 6y ago
Right, but browsers are "regulated". The attack surface that a website has against a user is much smaller than what an app has. Or at least was, I think websites and apps are converging now.

jbverschoor 6y ago

No they didn’t. They made a huge mistake: not forcing their own AppStore globally. The way to get app was by content aggregators and premium sms sites. Developers were lucky if they got 10% of the purchase price. So please people, stop complaining about 30% for discovery, security checks, big number of payment methods, tax-consolidation, and global availability.

Hnrobert42 6y ago

I love the word snaffle now.

shmerl 6y ago

Nokia had a chance with Meego. But internal politics killed it, and Symbain followed.

cdbattags 6y ago

I believe this is the same reason why https://hey.com https://hey.com will win too. Product engineering where the app/service is one big A/B test is how you truly figure out what your users want and need.

mathgladiator 6y ago

I think a better title would have been "Symbian did it right first!" and this then illustrates that doing things wrong were about priorities, and a better focus for user-focus was the winning play by others.

bglusman 6y ago

Being too early is the same as being wrong.

ineedasername 6y ago

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.

npunt 6y ago

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. But to launch a category defining smartphone, that limitation needed to be broken entirely, and that involves work outside of software; namely, timing the launch such that you can negotiate with AT&T to ease the data restriction. 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. I've written more about this type of dynamic here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/

randyrand 6y ago

Mostly decent article, but one point - Android is hardly a libertarian free for all. Google controls the way apps must ask for permission. If anything it shows that with just a single choice and no competition, android apps just all have to do the same shity thing. Opposite of libertarian.

beamatronic 6y ago

Sybian is a great product. It works well, but is a little expensive.

qserasera 6y ago

You can’t really manage your data if you don’t include your service providers