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In theory Symbian had huge potential as a vendor-independent smartphone OS. There was a couple of years in the early 2000s when it was used by Nokia, Sony Erics
by pavlov 3y ago
In theory Symbian had huge potential as a vendor-independent smartphone OS. There was a couple of years in the early 2000s when it was used by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola. By all rights it should have occupied the position that Android eventually did.
But Symbian’s fatal flaw was that it was too early to everything.
The software design was based on mid-1990s assumptions of what smartphones might need to do and what resources they’d have available. Everything started from a constrained embedded mindset. Meanwhile Apple built their mobile OS by scaling down their desktop OS which had originally been a high-end workstation OS. The phone guys couldn’t understand that was even possible.
The Symbian business model was similarly captive to the past. Open source wasn’t a serious thing when Nokia, Ericsson and Psion set up the Symbian corporation originally in the 1990s. So everything was a complicated licensing game. Worse, the vendors tried to outdo each other by creating incompatible but similar implementations of fundamental UX, so there wasn’t even a single Symbian for developers to target. This practically doomed it as an apps platform at a critical time.
- rstuart4133 3y ago> In theory Symbian had huge potential as a vendor-independent smartphone OS. Did you try to develop for Symbian? It's a very painful memory of mine. It seemed to be highly optimised for a very memory constrained environment. Granted the phones it ran on were very memory constrained, but ... shudder. Worse, in a few years it memory would not be so much of an issue and all those optimisations would turn into shackles.
- DeathArrow 3y agoNokia wasn't only about Symbian. They had Maemo, too. And at the time it was better than Android.
- memsom 3y agoSymbian actually had a negative effect - it held back Maemo internally and that and the internal politics surrounding the Symbian group asserting their dominance at the time ultimately hurt way more in the long run.
- Gravityloss 3y agoAalto University (called TKK at the time) had a lot of influence from Nokia naturally (HQ is about a kilometer away), and many people trained in Symbian stuff. You could hear from fellow students really damning comments how bad it was to develop anything for it.
- distances 3y agoI took a university course in mobile development (Symbian and Java ME). My main takeaway indeed was that I will definitely not become a mobile developer. In the end I did though, but only after Qt and later Android became the main mobile dev platforms. Such a night and day developer experience compared to native Symbian development.
- OnlyMortal 3y agoThe devs at Symbian used a version of CodeWarrior - on Windows. I believe they used the GNU compiler before that.