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Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployme
by kmac_ 2y ago
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were clear and logical, the code made sense, and the system was familiar. And then the App Store arrived with all the implications, such as a sudden mass market and less-obvious features like crash reports with stack traces from users. Apple was on an entirely different level than Nokia, and literally not a single developer wanted to touch Symbian anymore. It was effectively dead, even with millions of devices still in use, but it was obvious. Today I see a similar story unfolding, much more slowly, but the same thing is happening with Microsoft Windows.
- pjmlp 2y agoI was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo, which killed most developer love that was worked on during the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS. Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.
- ganzuul 2y agoMeanwhile marketing made sure everything looked fine on the outside, still recruiting app developers to the platform they were planning on abandoning. Wasted 2 years on that bitter, bitter lesson followed by prolonged depression.
- pjmlp 2y agoSorry about that, I was on the Networks unit, still I could follow most of the Mobile stuff from inside. After the Metrowerks based, tooling, there were two attempts with Eclipse, the first wasn't that great and I no longer remember the name, the second one was Carbide. Which is when then eventually acquired Qt, introduced PIPS to ease the pain, and started to make Symbian C++ dialect more friendlier, and closer to common programming without those strange two phase constructors, handles, and special suffix names on member functions. So the community was starting to see the light of transition that was several years in the making, and out of the sudden, that "we are going Windows Phone 7" on a company that was UNIX first for several years. When I joined, all network software was originally targeting HP-UX, for example. So there wasn't much Microsoft love on the corridors.
- distances 2y agoThat's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.
- toyg 2y agoAt managerial level, only half of Nokia was onboard with Qt. The other half wanted to chuck everything and just adopt something developed elsewhere; I reckon most of these folks simply resented the size the company had reached, and wanted to streamline. The latter half won the political battle and brought Elop in to do the dirty work.
- pjmlp 2y agoThe problem was that right after the Symbian developer community decided to embrace Qt, the Burning Platform memo came out, telling them to dump C++, learn C# and target Windows Phone 7, with either Silverligh or XNA. In a community that was largety anti-Microsoft, joking how bad Windows CE and Pocket PC used to be, versus Symbian handsets. The majority of the Symbian community felt betrayed and went elsewhere, to Apple and Google.
- justsomehnguy 2y agoIt's always amuses me how people blame Elop, completely ignoring everything what was done before him. >> No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph. >> In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android. >> Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979
- dash2 2y agoWindows is being replaced by Apple? Or doing the replacing?