Calling all mobile phone program developers: Nokia are relying on you to make their smart phone platform a hit. Symbian – the operating system behind just under 50% of the smart phones currently on the market – has announced that it is to make its software open source. The Nokia owned operating system has already been made free to use, but is increasingly struggling against the ingenuity of Apple and Google, who are grabbing an ever more impressive share of the market. Apple and Google can claim to be behind most of the more popular smart phones, despite Symbian’s dominance in terms of pure numbers of handsets in circulation.
Many pundits see the move as one of desperation, with Symbian and Nokia evidently hoping that by opening up their programming to the public, people will develop a more impressive and useful range of applications to run on it. The Android platform, however, is also open source and seen by most developers as a better bet, with Symbian having fallen in terms of market share from more than 60% to less than 50% over the past few years. Many mobile experts are predicting the fall will continue to less than one third of all smart phones within the next five years.
Symbian’s leader Lee Williams is touting the launch as an ‘ahead of schedule’ move to open source, and placing responsibility for the development of the platform with ‘the world’s development community, who can shape the future’. While the use of open source methods will no doubt bring in faster developments all round, for Symbian, to expect it to overtake Apple (who many developers focus on exclusively, with the aim of making money through the Apps Store) or the Android (which launched open source sooner, and is a growing platform) seems like an unjustified leap of faith, and a move made too late.
