Don’t get me wrong. I steal the title from Robert Scoble’s posting, Steve Jobs in not an idiot. Why? Because I am going to discuss a similar topic, i.e. how important the role of third party developers for a platform.

Symbian Signed The story actually began when SymbianSigned.com service was down a couple of days back. It is will be down for at least 2 weeks! Here is the announcement from Symbian Signed team in their discussion board:

Unfortunately we still do not have a date for when the web site will running as normal again. I can confirm however that the problems are hardware related and will not be resolved for at least 2 weeks from today. We will keep you updated as we get more information.

What does it mean? It means some third party developers will not be able to do their works in the next 2 weeks. This was expressed by Rob in Symbian’s discussion board:

… Yes, I have read the messages. Yes, I have sent you an “enable me” email. But what do I tell my customer? When am I going to be able to get dev certs again?

Let’s take a look back at the history of Symbian Signed. Since the introduction of Platform Security on Symbian OS 9, any applications have to be signed. There are some applications that can be self-certified. Unfortunately, many of them are not in this category.

What does it mean for third party developers? There are two things:

  • Commercial developers. They have to pay a couple of hundred dollars to get their application signed. The cost varies depending on the testing house. This “high cost” may not be a problem for big companies; but it is a problem for small and independent developers (see also Death of the Bedroom Coders).
  • Freeware/open source developers. There is a special route for freeware and open source developers. They don’t need to pay anything. This is good news. Unfortunately, the process is really frustrating. Some developers experience delay in the signing process up to 2 - 3 months (see also my open letter to Symbian Signed Authority). How are we going to release updates or bug fixes?

In my opinion, Symbian is trying to kill small developers. They want to deal with big players only. It’s like saying, “If you don’t have money, please do not develop for our platform. We don’t want you to waste our time”. It also seems they ignore freeware and open source communities.

Back to Scoble’s posting, why is it related to Symbian Signed? Scoble has a good point; he mentioned why Apple didn’t win against Microsoft in 1989.

But Apple didn’t realize the power of developers. They ignored Hypercard. Never really improved it. Never gave developers really great tools. I remember meeting software developers who worked on Apple applications and they were always complaining about how hard they were to use, or how many rules they had to follow to make sure their apps were “Apple compliant.”

Are we feeling de-javu now?

If you have experience programming for Symbian OS, I am pretty sure you know what I am talking about. It’s not only with Symbian Signed. There are many strange programming paradigms in Symbian OS. Besides that the development tools and documentation are very poor. See also an article from TheCodeProject, Symbian OS Design Faults.

Why do I write this posting? It is not for attacking Symbian. Honestly, I make my living from Symbian OS. Let’s learn from Apple’s mistake and do something. More and more developers are going to the Redmond’s club.

Bonus Links