Why does nokia use symbian

At that point, the only remaining Symbian backer and the main contributor to the Symbian code base said goodbye to the OS, and the writing was on the wall for what would happen next. Today, Symbian is actually maintained by Accenture , a management consulting company, to which Nokia outsourced development and shipped off thousands of employees in Accenture is supposed to maintain the OS through So, what killed Symbian? Two more versions of the OS followed, Symbian Anna , which brought browser speed and text input improvements and ushered in a new rounded icon-based UI.

Followed by a final update: Symbian Belle. Belle added additional modernising touches such as more customisable widgets, extra homescreens, a pull down status screen for accessing settings and viewing missed missives, notifications on the lockscreen, and support for NFC.

The problem was Android already had all those things. The old folder based menu hierarchy that Symbian had carried with it from its PDA days had finally been entirely flattened. But it had taken far too long to level the playing field. At the start of this year Nokia confirmed that the Symbian-based PureView — announced in with much fanfare thanks to its 41MP camera sensor — would be the last device it makes on the Symbian platform. After all, they were the key strengths that had allowed it to travel so far and find its way on to so many devices for so many years in the first place.

By the time I got to Palm, and we were wrestling with how best to provide a multicore platform for smartphones, we started to realise that Symbian had some real potential.

Limited, and then took the reigns as the head of the Foundation, the platform appeared to be the preeminent system for the mobile age. What was ironic, was that its strengths ended up being the soul of its demise. But what about the view from the development trenches? And that ultimately dragged down the more modern-looking apps now being developed for it. In short, Symbian Belle was great but years too late.

There was also a large range of third-party software — again, a relatively new phenomenon, but one which has served smartphone makers well ever since. It's pretty much what Apple's success is built on, in fact. Symbian even considered the options of an app store and extending the OS beyond mobile and into other devices like games consoles, although neither plan eventually went ahead. Symbian also spotted the importance of touch and large-screen devices, supporting UIs just for such handsets — Series 90 and UIQ for touch albeit stylus rather than multitouch based , and Series 80 for big-screen handsets.

It even picked up on the web browsing trend early, making a WebKit based browser available from WebKit is today used by the likes of Apple, as well as Android. It also used the open source development model that underpins Android, with Nokia in buying up the shares in Symbian that it didn't already own in order to turn it into the not-for-profit Symbian Foundation.

It was a move that made a lot of sense, but one which failed to pay off. The first version of the open source software was released in , meaning handsets using it were only available from by which time, Apple and Android stars had kept rising while Nokia had changed direction on Symbian once again , bringing development back in house and turning the Foundation into a licensing group. But despite having ideas that were ahead of its time, Symbian failed to benefit from the first mover advantage of any of them.

You don't use phones to sell ecosystems, you use ecosystems to sell phones. Symbian had always embraced and encouraged third-party developers, making an attempt to woo them in through Symbian Signed , an initiative that gave third-party apps the Symbian stamp of approval without the need to get them checked out by a testing house — making the whole process of getting apps into users' hands cheaper, quicker and easier.

By the time that the iPhone launched, there were 10, apps available for the Symbian platform. Inside Nokia's headquarters: A photo tour. From reindeer stew to a wall of Nokia's greatest hits, here's a look inside Nokia's global HQ, not far from the Finnish capital of Helsinki. However, "as it turns out, after-market software sales for Symbian smartphones remained low", according to an academic paper authored by former Symbian exec David Wood and San Jose university professor Joel West.

And while 10, apps is no mean feat, it did take over seven years for Symbian to reach that milestone, while Apple hit its first , in a little over a year after releasing the first SDK for iOS. What aided Apple and hobbled Symbian was the same phenomenon: the app store. Apple made it easier for consumers to buy apps by opening a single storefront, a feat Symbian never managed, although Nokia did open the Ovi store in to sell Symbian apps — notably behind Apple's iOS, Android and RIM's BlackBerry OS, which got their app stores in The Ovi brand was discontinued later that year, with the store taking on the Nokia mantle instead.

Nigel Clifford, head of Symbian from to and now CEO of Procserve, described the lack of a single Symbian app store as one of Symbian's "fatal fragmentations". Despite their common OS, no app written for one OS could be used on the other — while elements of code could be reused, a developer wanting to write something that worked on both S60 and UIQ, say, essentially had to produce two different apps.

They therefore kept these pieces in their organisations rather than allowing us to develop them alongside the OS to create a fabulous unified user experience like you get from Apple - and so make their devices more compelling and competitive in the face of the bigger threat of Android, Apple, RIM competition. But all of these near-misses pale in comparison to one of the main technological drivers that helped push Symbian into decline.

Symbian was becoming an unmanageable bit of software. It represented challenges in how you could change the user experience.

Or, as West and Wood summed it up: "Symbian was limited by its legacy code and its installed based to meet the challenge of more modern APIs and better development tools provided by Apple and Google, which both started with a clean slate.

Perhaps it's no surprise that Symbian had become unmanageable. Aside from its Psion heritage, Symbian was "held captive" by its partners and the industry at large, according to Lee Williams, former head of the Foundation. I remember in one case there were 10, requirements to get Symbian products onto that one carrier's network.

A typical carrier requirement would anything from do or don't include wi-fi support to where things showed up on a menu. Symbian, once a high-end platform, stagnated — it couldn't change fast enough to compete and so attract developers.

When the Symbian Foundation was created and the decision to open source the OS was taken, it hoped to unleash the software — from its licence fee, from its closed roots, and from the supply chain that held it hostage.

By going open source, the Foundation hoped they'd give operators the confidence to keep investing in the platform. The signs were good: by going open source, the foundation was taking Symbian out from under the dominance of Nokia, and removing the licence fee.

Moves were made to address the question of fragmentation with unification of Symbian UIs under Series 60 and the addition of the Qt software layer which would make porting apps across platforms — MeeGo, Series 40 and Symbian, a lot easier. There were even efforts to tackle the apps and ecosystem question.

After Nokia's launch of its own, rather than a Symbian, app store provoked "much heated discussion and conflict", the Foundation started work on an uber-store with APIs that third-parties could use to fashion their own stores from. For example, developers with five apps could make a mini-store just containing those apps. Better yet, they could sell them through the Foundation's channel without the organisation taking a cut.

There was still a lot of conflict, some infighting among the manufacturers and issues that needed to be resolved" such as who would pay for the necessary development work, said Williams. And, despite the promising initial signs, those who had joined the Foundation in its early days began to peel away. For Wood and West, the problem that really saw Symbian fall apart was, retrospectively, inherent from its very beginning.

Symbian's ability to set an independent course was "ultimately constrained by the dual role of its largest shareholder and customer [ To begin with, the existence of such divided leadership suggests a broader problem of defining and operationalising platform leadership with multiple leaders.

For example, Gawer and Henderson define Microsoft and Intel as platform leaders [with Wintel]; if the Symbian platform were similarly defined, then the leaders would be Symbian and ARM but clearly platform licensees played a crucial if not controlling role in its evolution.