Mark Wilcox's Forum Nokia Blog - Symbian getting open source friendly - almost there

Cairo work in progress

iwanj

http://code.google.com/p/cairo-for-symbian

Statistics

JOM

I agree, the numbers are totally ridiculous: 500 000 devs working on 10 000 apps means 50 persons a sw :D But those numbers do include Nokia, Symbian, Samsung, LG, UIQ, SonyEricson, Motorola etc. - not only 3rd party developers. That's sometimes hard to remember.

Btw more numbers: Windows Mobile has 18000 apps (http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/07/windows_mobile_7.html).

Love the quote: "Too bad the WinMo 6.1 device I have is so buggy and crashing all the time. Oh, wait, that's my iPhone. No, wait, it's both...
Right now the only stable mobile platform I am using is Nokia's S60 OS."

--jouni who released 14 apps since March 2008 ;)

Number or apps & developers figures

Sorcery-ltd

I mostly ignore the developer statistics that get thrown around. I think it's clear that quite a large number of developers didn't bother to update their applications for 3rd Edition. The 10,000 figure in this case is also supposed to include Java ME apps that have been tailored to Symbian devices. It allows a lot of room for dispute and debate. Considering that Symbian is now way behind iPhone on this measure and still hasn't managed to match the original Palm platform (which I heard had about 16,000 apps).

These figure make the "number of developers for Symbian platforms" that get quoted seem even more ridiculous. At Nokia World Lee Williams said 4 million, that's half a million more than there were at the Smartphone show... perhaps they added the Qt developers already!? It seems to be a case of counting every developer capable of coding in one of the languages on the Symbian platform... in reality I'd be surprised if there were more than 500,000 developers actually working on Symbian apps/services/devices.

Then again, I think it's all irrelevant - what's important is the number of application that people actually might want to use regularly, which is probably comparable (and very low) on all the mobile platforms still.

Mark

Symbian Signed being unfriendly

JOM

The official number of S60 applications has been "10 000" for a couple years now, which is pretty suspicious to say the least. When looking at historical data from various sources, it's pretty obvious that something dramatic happened between 2.x and 3.0: Symbian Signed would be my guess. Maybe it didn't kill S60 sw development, but at least stalled the progress.

Will be interesting to hear how the new Symbian Foundation will solve this problem - and I would say it should be a recognized problem now that Apple's AppStore passed the 10000 application count recently.

Cheers,

--jouni