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I worked at Nokia when management stubbornly kept flogging the dead horse that was Symbian. It didn't work. It just wasn't good enough. Android, even in it's ea

I worked at Nokia when management stubbornly kept flogging the dead horse that was Symbian. It didn't work. It just wasn't good enough. Android, even in it's early versions was hardly perfect but still ran circles around Symbian. Android at the time had issues with stability, features, performance, etc. But it was a breath of fresh air compared to Symbian devices which had even more of those type of issues. And of course the iphone redefined what a smart phone should be around the same time. Nokia actually opensourced it around that time as well. Symbian has been open source for well over a decade. This looks more like the retirement of what remains of that effort, which included the Symbian Foundation. Presumably, by now there are very few; if any, commercial users of Symbian left. So, they are parking the source code at Github for whomever still has some use for it. As you can see from the commit logs, development has been dead since 2010. I seriously doubt that is going to change.

jojobas 4y ago
I don't know, Nokia C7 was pretty good in 2011, Android was nowhere near it. Granted, I never tried developing for it.
- forty 4y ago
  Yeah, I had a Nokia E65 (2007) and with Opera mini I was able to browse the real web normally. That's why I never quite understood what was all the "revolution" around iphone (except the touch part, but that seemed to me to be a really bad idea at the time, as someone could not stand fingers on screens ^^)
Ste_Evans 4y ago
Nokia's problem was their UI, which was not controlled by Symbian, not the underlying OS. Hundreds of Symbian-OS based phones were on the market from 2001, including in the Japanese market which had the most testing. The p800 and p910 had a UI similar to iPhone and Android in 2003, 3 years before the iPhone, on 3G networks. The second version of the Symbian OS kernel from 2003 was real time i.e. a comms stack could be run together with the apps off the one CPU. Are the Linux kernel or iOS kernel real time now even? Android OS and iOS are hacks of desktop OSes so are optimised for performance rather than battery life or memory usage; Symbian OS was designed as a mobile OS from the beginning optimising power and memory management. It was the timing of Google's IPO which scuppered Symbian. Google were able to spend billions getting Android in place to capture Symbian's market share and customers as iPhone buzz grew the market.
- sergers 4y ago
  I imported a Panasonic x800 from japan to Canada in 2005. Ran Symbian 2.0 I didn't even know Symbian was available on non nokia Was very advanced for the time, everyone was impressed here as there werent any similar devices locally available. This was my last phone before moving over to blackberry to get on the BBM bandwagon(after the x800 fell, and hit the push button opener and popped open the screen and cracked... With no locally available parts wasn't worth it to fix....). Never had to do anything from the dev side, but the usability/functionality was steps ahead at the time
- secondcoming 4y ago
  And we know now that Google wanted its own OS so it could scrape all the data it could from phones. That wouldn’t have been possible with Symbian.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  You are right that there were lots of Symbian manufacturers. Notable is that most of those were gone from the market by 2010. Windows CE eroded the market share and Nokia being so dominant meant most of its competitors did not want to be second in line for OS updates and influence. When Ericsson gave up being a phone manufacturer (they had their own UI platform for Symbian), the rest of them disappeared quickly. By the time Nokia took ownership of Symbian, it was effectively the only company left still depending on it. The complex ownership of Symbian was one of the reasons it took many years to get operating system releases to market. Because first Symbian had to release a new version, which would only happen every few years or so and featured a lot of design by committee style decision making. And then it's users/owners would design products around that, which also took years. It did not help that Nokia was a hardware company ran by electrical engineers that did not realize it was being bottle-necked on software. So, you would get new S60 products featuring bugs that had been fixed in other S60 products because they literally forked the same code base those were based on but before the bug had been patched. It was beyond stupid. And S60 was indeed a dumpster fire. One of the (many) issues with it was that it did not actually have any touch screen capability because Nokia killed that off around the time the rumors about the iphone started swirling. They then rushed out a version of S60 (v5.0) to "compete" with the iphone that re-created some of that. But then they also still had lots of v3.0 S60 products in the market for several years. Which did not help the messaging. 5.0 was a rush job and the initial products tanked hard. First there was the tube and then the N97. Both were products with lots of software issues. And subsequent efforts to fix it did not improve things. Most of the fixes amounted to too little too late.
pjmlp 4y ago
I was on the Networks business unit during those days, and even today, trying to use Android NDK still makes me miss Symbian C++ despite its warts, it is incredible how Android team has managed to make a mess out of it.
_448 4y ago
Symbian was not in a dictating position as Google or Apple are. Symbian was a complex company structure with major handset manufacturers having their separate agendas. People at Symbian had to walk a very tight rope catering to the demands of everyone. Not an easy task.

jojobas 4y ago

I don't know, Nokia C7 was pretty good in 2011, Android was nowhere near it. Granted, I never tried developing for it.

forty 4y ago
Yeah, I had a Nokia E65 (2007) and with Opera mini I was able to browse the real web normally. That's why I never quite understood what was all the "revolution" around iphone (except the touch part, but that seemed to me to be a really bad idea at the time, as someone could not stand fingers on screens ^^)

Ste_Evans 4y ago

Nokia's problem was their UI, which was not controlled by Symbian, not the underlying OS. Hundreds of Symbian-OS based phones were on the market from 2001, including in the Japanese market which had the most testing. The p800 and p910 had a UI similar to iPhone and Android in 2003, 3 years before the iPhone, on 3G networks. The second version of the Symbian OS kernel from 2003 was real time i.e. a comms stack could be run together with the apps off the one CPU. Are the Linux kernel or iOS kernel real time now even? Android OS and iOS are hacks of desktop OSes so are optimised for performance rather than battery life or memory usage; Symbian OS was designed as a mobile OS from the beginning optimising power and memory management. It was the timing of Google's IPO which scuppered Symbian. Google were able to spend billions getting Android in place to capture Symbian's market share and customers as iPhone buzz grew the market.

sergers 4y ago
I imported a Panasonic x800 from japan to Canada in 2005. Ran Symbian 2.0 I didn't even know Symbian was available on non nokia Was very advanced for the time, everyone was impressed here as there werent any similar devices locally available. This was my last phone before moving over to blackberry to get on the BBM bandwagon(after the x800 fell, and hit the push button opener and popped open the screen and cracked... With no locally available parts wasn't worth it to fix....). Never had to do anything from the dev side, but the usability/functionality was steps ahead at the time
secondcoming 4y ago
And we know now that Google wanted its own OS so it could scrape all the data it could from phones. That wouldn’t have been possible with Symbian.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
You are right that there were lots of Symbian manufacturers. Notable is that most of those were gone from the market by 2010. Windows CE eroded the market share and Nokia being so dominant meant most of its competitors did not want to be second in line for OS updates and influence. When Ericsson gave up being a phone manufacturer (they had their own UI platform for Symbian), the rest of them disappeared quickly. By the time Nokia took ownership of Symbian, it was effectively the only company left still depending on it. The complex ownership of Symbian was one of the reasons it took many years to get operating system releases to market. Because first Symbian had to release a new version, which would only happen every few years or so and featured a lot of design by committee style decision making. And then it's users/owners would design products around that, which also took years. It did not help that Nokia was a hardware company ran by electrical engineers that did not realize it was being bottle-necked on software. So, you would get new S60 products featuring bugs that had been fixed in other S60 products because they literally forked the same code base those were based on but before the bug had been patched. It was beyond stupid. And S60 was indeed a dumpster fire. One of the (many) issues with it was that it did not actually have any touch screen capability because Nokia killed that off around the time the rumors about the iphone started swirling. They then rushed out a version of S60 (v5.0) to "compete" with the iphone that re-created some of that. But then they also still had lots of v3.0 S60 products in the market for several years. Which did not help the messaging. 5.0 was a rush job and the initial products tanked hard. First there was the tube and then the N97. Both were products with lots of software issues. And subsequent efforts to fix it did not improve things. Most of the fixes amounted to too little too late.

pjmlp 4y ago

I was on the Networks business unit during those days, and even today, trying to use Android NDK still makes me miss Symbian C++ despite its warts, it is incredible how Android team has managed to make a mess out of it.

_448 4y ago

Symbian was not in a dictating position as Google or Apple are. Symbian was a complex company structure with major handset manufacturers having their separate agendas. People at Symbian had to walk a very tight rope catering to the demands of everyone. Not an easy task.