Symbian Won
shkspr.mobi
Symbian Won
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Re: Symbian Won
#2Symbian (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!).
Re: Symbian Won
#3Symbian (and Java ME was awful as well) was not developer friendly at all till towards the very end. By then it was too late. You never had a choice to get rid of the annoying untrusted app pop up, and getting code-signing was a nightmare. Apple was in contrast incredibly developer friendly when they started their store and then Android one-upped them (only 25 usd to join!).
I worked in the mobile phone industry 00s. 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.
Re: Symbian Won
#4That'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.
Re: Symbian Won
#5I 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.
Re: Symbian Won
#6Got depression doing Symbian development. (I am not kidding.)
Re: Symbian Won
#7it 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.
Re: Symbian Won
#8> 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.
Re: Symbian Won
#9That'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.
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.
Re: Symbian Won
#10Got depression doing Symbian development. (I am not kidding.)
not enough information
was it related to symbian design choices?