[CoMoDev] Re: Mobile device market trends
- From: David Beers <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <comodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 12:23:52 -0600
Wow. That is rather tough.
I think I remember reading somewhere why this might be so. Symbian is designed
to have a very customizable UI and one of the problems I've heard developers
were having is getting their apps to run properly on the customized OSes that
different vendors were putting out. Now think of this from the hardware
vendor's standpoint: a user downloads and installs an app that may or may not
look/work like crap on its hardware. As the hardware vendor what do you do?
Make darn sure the user knows "it's the developer's fault for not certifying
their application with us."
My guess (and this is just a big fat guess) is that despite having an
overwhelming advantage in terms of deployed devices, Symbian probably has (a)
fewer users who actually buy 3rd party software, (b) fewer developers as well,
and (c) most of the 3rd party apps are probably games. Sheer brute numbers
still mean there may yet be a good market for Symbian software, but that market
is probably biggest in Europe. If you want to sell shareware there you'll need
to worry about internationalization of your apps and VAT taxes.
David
On Wed, 2 Jun 2004 10:52:38 -0600, Rick Sands wrote:
> I have a Nokia Communicator 9210 (The Brick) running Symbian. I
> started writing applications for it but quickly gave up as Nokia is
> (was? This was a couple years ago) very hostile towards supporting
> small developers: If your application didn't go through a Nokia
> Certification which the developer had to pay for (per app), your
> application would display a nasty warning message to the user about
> the application being uncertified and running it would be at their
> own risk. Sure, I suppose this keeps better QC, but at the same
> time, it stifled grass-roots development.
>
> -Rick
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