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Nokia and Microsoft have announced a deal in which Nokia will abandon its Symbian operating system in favour of Windows Mobile 7. The move seems surprising as a policy shift for Nokia, who has spent a lot of time and money developing its core operating system. Well before Android became such a huge player in the handset market, Nokia was doing the same thing with Symbian – using the Java programming language for applications and opening the code up for modification. Sony Ericsson was an adamant supporter until they made the switch to Android on their Experia line. Instead they have gone with a 3rd party OS with a strong aversion to the Open Source community.
North American consumers won’t really see a difference, given a comparative 3 month performance of 2 million Windows phones to 74 million iPhones sold. But developers certainly will.
Nokia is the largest handset maker in the world. Their major markets are Europe and Africa. While North Americans are currently tucking their iPhones onto their bedside table at night, the future may see global companies developing once for all markets.
With this move, Nokia and Windows have both complicated and simplified the creation of branded apps. One less operating system leaves only the big four – Android, Apple’s iOS, Blackberry and Microsoft Mobile – to develop against. The upshot: developing native apps just got that much more streamlined. That being said, this developer sympathizes with those who just competed in a Nokia contest to develop native apps that will no longer be supported on the Windows Mobile platform.
On the other hand, creating the apps will require the use of .NET on top of Objective-C for iOS and Java for Blackberry and Android.
With the latest release of the Blackberry operating system 89% of all mobile browsing in North America was done on a device capable of using a WebKit framework-based browser. Although not 100% the same on every device, it did allow for many of the same features to be implemented more easily. On Windows Mobile 7, the browser is a combination of Internet Explorer 7 and 8, which, if you have created a website and then had to deal with issues of cross-browser compatibility, will only be made more difficult by a mobile platform.
From what I can tell, the coming together of Nokia and Microsoft is pretty much guaranteed to send developers’ heads clanking against their monitors as they attempt to make it all work together. But, perhaps, only time will tell.
Jacoub Bondre
March 1, 2011 @ 10:21 am
What this shows to me, is that Windows, RIM, Google, and Apple are all trying to create their own development community, or leverage an existing one.
More and more, these companies are realizing their devices are only as good as the apps developed for them. One would thing that the number of Java and .Net devs out weigh Objective C. Should be interesting to see how that affects the market over the next 5 years.