[CoMoDev] Re: Mobile device market trends
- From: "Sue Spielman" <sspielman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <comodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 13:31:50 -0600
If you are interested in looking into Symbian stuff, check out this site:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/
It has a lot of good info there.
Sue
-----Original Message-----
From: comodev-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:comodev-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of David Beers
Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2004 12:24 PM
To: comodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [CoMoDev] Re: Mobile device market trends
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
Other related posts:
