The Future of Symbian

S3D writes "On 18 May 2004, Symbian, owner of the OS for high-end smartphones announced the formal launch of the Symbian Signed initiative for digitally signing and certifying Symbian applications that meet a set of test criteria. Gartner believes that Symbian Signed, in its current form, is a weak certification program oriented largely toward the needs of application publishers and network operators and may be inconvinient for developers. "

Warning, parent is a troll....

[dealsites]

Link is slightly mispelled. Not quite safe for work. Pretty good try though.

--
New deal processing engine online: http://www.dealsites.net/livedeals.html [dealsites.net]

For people wondering about freeware developers

[matthew.thompson]

From https://www.symbiansigned.com/Symbian_Signed_White _Paper.pdf

"5.4. Freeware developers and the development process

Symbian Signed recognises the innovation and value of the Freeware developer community and will introduce a Peer Review process which shall enable high quality Freeware applications which successfully pass the review process. Symbian Signed shall introduce this process during H2 2004.

Certification is the means by which such software makes the transition from the developer community to the commercial world. However, there needs to be a means for developers to run applications without signing, both as part of the development process and to permit those with the technical skill to share ideas (e.g. developer groups at universities).

Under normal circumstances this is not a problem as all phones allow installation of unsigned applications (usually with a warning). It is possible, however, in the future that some operators may require that only signed applications can be installed on phones supplied to their networks. In this case, the operators and phone makers will need to take steps to support the developer community.

Generally this is achieved by providing "unlocked phones". Alternatively, there are opportunities in principle to integrate capabilities into the development tools (IDEs) that allow developers to install unsigned applications directly from the development tools. The choice of the most appropriate mechanism is an issue for the operators/phone makers.

This will allow the developer community to develop applications even on phones that may normally restrict the installation of unsigned apps."

Re:Symbian?

[WegianWarrior]

Not a player? Sorry mate - but as far as I'm concerned the Psion5 I got is still the best thing when it comes to putting in large amounths of texts on the road (it runs EPOC - the forerunner to symbian) - while I can't ask for more in a PDA than my Palm m130 delivers.

Just because MicroSoft claims to be about the same size as Palm on the OS side of things, it don't mean that there wont be people like me who'll either stick to the old devices or are willing to pay for getting new devices with the same OS on them... It's also worth noting that your source seems awfully biased ;)

Re:Questions

[ColourlessGreenIdeas]

'They' don't, but other people have sort-of ported the developer tools to Linux. Google for gnupoc. But the emulator is Win32 only, so you can't debug on the emulator (you can run the emulator under Wine if you want to). The standard Symbian compiler for the target is gcc. For the emulator it's Microsoft (for series 60) or CodeWarrior (for UIQ)

Certification of handheld apps has never caught on

[samalone]

I attended a handheld software developers conference last year where many of the talks were given by Symbian and Sony/Ericsson. They were trying to recruit developers to their platform, but it quickly became clear that they had little understanding of the commercial market for handheld software.

The wireless carriers are accustomed to controlling both the handset that customers use and all of the software on that handset. Now that handsets have become smartphones, most of the carriers would like to maintain their position at the top of the customer foodchain by pre-certifying the software that can run on customer handsets and controlling the installation and sales of that software through the carrier's web portal. I don't really blame them: Revenues from voice traffic are declining, and so far revenues from data traffic aren't increasing fast enough to make up the difference.

The problem is that independent software vendors don't want to buy into this system. Developing software for handhelds is difficult -- more difficult than developing similar desktop software because of the constrained resources on a handheld. Despite this, prices for handheld software are generally lower than for desktop software because customers perceive these to be "small" applications that should have "small" prices.

Certification makes life more difficult for independent software vendors without providing much in return. It adds another expense to the software development process. It discourages frequent updates to the software (which customers generally like) by increasing the time and cost of each release.

Worse, if certification is manditory, it prevents the customer from trying the software before purchasing it, and it prevents developers from testing and refining the software with real customers before certifying it.

In my experience, these certification programs never achieve enough "brand awareness" from customers to become a factor in their purchasing decision. Companies look for and require certifications before making purchases, but individuals rarely do. So the software developer doesn't derive any benefit from the additional hassle and expense of getting certified.

It's going to come down to this: Customers who are willing to pay a premium to get a smartphone are going to want one where they can install whatever software they want, not just software "certified" by the carrier. Most software developers will try to market directly to these customers rather than dealing with the extra cost and hassle of certification.