14 October 2008

A Developer Support Perspective
on the Symbian Foundation

There is quite an interesting interview over at SymbianOne with Antony Edwards, Vice President, Developer Product Marketing at Symbian.

One of Nokia's reasons for creating Symbian Foundation and making Symbian open source was to drive innovation by attracting developers and this interview is mostly focused on how developers will be able to contribute to the Symbian Foundation, the challenge of software distribution and how the Symbian Foundation's developer program is shaping up.

In my personal opinion, Symbian Foundation and open source is a definitely good idea with a huge potential but I don’t think that open source itself is enough to attract independent developers and they’ll have to do a lot more to involve the hobby coders into Symbian Foundation project!

Richard: What benefits are you hoping to achieve for developers through the creation of the Symbian Foundation?

Antony: The Symbian Foundation will offer developers many benefits and make it easier for them to tap into the huge potential offered by Symbian devices.

In terms of the mechanics of software development, the number one benefit will be the unity and coherence the Foundation brings. This is going to affect all developers, from those working with silicon vendors through to third-party application developers and students. They are no longer going to have to deal with the fragmentation between S 60, UIQ, and MOAP. This means they'll have not only one single set of APIs, but also one place where they can get all the tools and information they need for development. So the SDK, development tools, API documentation and education will be in one place. It will be in one format and well integrated.

From a commercial perspective the main benefit will be that the Foundation will massively increase the market share of Symbian devices. We will see them push further into the mass market, but also into higher end devices. Even in the categories where Symbian is already strong, I expect the Foundation will drive growth further too. This will happen because the Foundation's open source approach removes the barriers that have held licensees back: the concern associated with choosing a single OS that might be perceived as belonging to rival companies.

The other really fantastic benefit is access to the source code. This will enable developers to understand the platform and exploit its features better. We ship a lot of great technology in Symbian OS, but it can often take quite some time for developers to become proficient in using it. Having the source code will allow developers to gain a better understanding of the features they are already familiar with and accelerate their ability to take advantage of new features. I also know that many developers have itches they want to scratch in the Symbian OS code, and now they will be able to do something about that, because they will be able to contribute code back into the source tree.