Symbian Won

But by the time Nokia took over Symbian it became apparent that they saw Linux as the future OS for high-end devices and Symbian was to be relegated to mid-level devices.

In the UK I'd had my Nokia 6680 with front and rear cameras, unlimited 3G, multi-tasking apps, a proper web browser, the ability to install apps, and even some crap ability to watch TV. It also had a memory card for storing and playing music. I had it connected to my Powerbook (17" powerbook was my best laptop ever), and had 3G usable browsing speeds anywhere, wirelessly through bluetooth, and the phone's 3G. It synced contacts, emails, etc.

Coming to the US I got the latest and greatest - a Razor. It had an OS that felt like going back to the 70s. No 3G. No camera at all. No apps or ability to use them. Contacts on the SIM with no decent data. All it could do well was text or call.

Even the first iPhones were well behind the Symbian/6680 combo I'd had for a while in the UK (no 3G, no apps, no multi-tasking, no front camera), and it wasn't until the iPhone 4 in 2010 that I got the front camera back, which meant I had feature parity with what I'd had in the UK in 2005.

Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnitch on Mac (I just hope it's going to keep working on ARM macs), AFWall+ and XPrivacy on Android and miss this level of control terribly on Linux (it sort of can be achieved with AppArmor or SELinux but both are nightmares to use).

If only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path and other process parameters - that would be just so awesome. There was such a feature in some 2.x kernel but, sadly, it was deprecated long ago.

But that's cool with users. It's not annoying, it's more or less a one time thing, maybe a hint more if the app is a bit more unusual.

The Symbian notifications? That's a "I hate you, user". Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that?

On the other hand, some of those warnings made sense at the time. Mobile internet was so expensive that I never enabled it. Right up there with MMS one of the things that priced itself out of the reach of regular customers. It was like 3€ to send one single MMS, Internet was also in that domain - per Megabyte (I should note here that the country I lived in is technologically a third world country). That changed only later. So a more modern iPhone and Android could design those things differently.

Data caps mattered in that era, so from a narrow point of view it was the smart thing to offer those features. But to launch a category defining smartphone, that limitation needed to be broken entirely, and that involves work outside of software; namely, timing the launch such that you can negotiate with AT&T to ease the data restriction.

It's like saying RealPlayer 'won' against YouTube. No, they didn't. They just mistimed an idea, and a few implementation details were the same.

I've written more about this type of dynamic here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/

Everyone else did it better. It's not about who invented it first, its about innovating over other inventions.

Symbian still failed commercially in the market and couldn't compete or innovate with the other competitors.

I really wish I could have a smartphone with similar hardware that I could upload some executable on it written in C.

I still cannot believe there are no minimalist RPi-like smartphone that lets you easily do this. Smartphones today are overpriced supercomputers with asthmatic batteries with hardware that is possibly full of backdoors.

I know there's the pinephone, but I would rather have more limited, slower/cheaper hardware instead.

That hardly deserves the extremely click-baity headline of "Symbian Won"

"Symbian Won on User Permissions" would be reasonable, and probably get less attention.

Apple was in contrast incredibly developer friendly when they started their store and then Android one-upped them (only 25 usd to join!).

You could choose per app which connection they should be using, or even a group with order of preference. So you could get your work apps to only work over WiFi, some apps always go over VPN, some always use 4G even if WiFi was active. It was brilliant because all these connections could be active at the same time.

Apple and Google are only just catching up to this now with tricks like Per-App VPN but it still doesn't offer the same level of flexibility.

source: I used my Nokia phones internationally by swapping SIMs and there was a huge difference between US and European plans.

    >Symbian: Opening a secure connection. Continue?
    >IE6: You are about to view pages over a secure connection

The way to get app was by content aggregators and premium sms sites. Developers were lucky if they got 10% of the purchase price.

So please people, stop complaining about 30% for discovery, security checks, big number of payment methods, tax-consolidation, and global availability.

What has won is capability-based design, and the fact that the review system in iOS is better (but not perfect) compared to Google. The install base is also much larger though, and the amount of personal data on a smartphone has also increased greatly.

The question we need to ask ourselves is the following: do we really need all this data available on our smartphone? Or, put different: do you need to be able to access this data while on the go, 24/7? Do you need to take your smartphone with you 24/7?

Like with browser extensions I don't want access to all pages and tabs. I want [say] access to the `href` attribute `value` of the `link` elements that have attribute `rel` that is `alternate` AND `type` that is either `application/rss+xml` OR `application/atom+xml`

To be described to the user as: "Permission to discover RSS and Atom feeds."

I pay 25 euro, I wait, the platform ppl sign of on it, I update the tool with the new permission.

I then tried to learn Symbian and I found the IDE hard to setup, the API was hard to learn, and I believe it only ran on windows.

At the time I thought to myself “the NeXT/Cocoa API and utilities are so awesome, so easy, so mature that if Apple ever makes it possible to write mobile apps with them, they are totally going to absolutely destroy everyone else in the mobile development marketplace. Especially Symbian.”

Doesn't the premise of the article disprove this statement? There's been no regulatory movement forcing the "Symbian" granular permission approach.

I'd argue the pseudo-regulated app stores were a bigger source of the problem, not the "libertarian free-for-all". That is, having an app store with Apple or Google's name on it is what encouraged users to let their guard down and trust all the apps on it. If you had to download the "battery charger" app from Bob's Phone Tools' site instead of the Google Play store, you'd maybe be a little more skeptical of that permissions list.

The way modern iOS and Android handles asking for permissions doesn’t seem all that similar to me.

Symbian was asking about network connectivity because, at the time, mobile phone networks charged for data in ridiculously small increments at high prices.

One of Apple’s biggest innovations was to convince Cingular to sell an unlimited data plan at a price acceptable to the general consumer and not just for businesses.

If I recall correctly, there was a good period of time where BlackBerry service plans cost more than the iPhone by 10 or 20 dollars per month, and yet a BlackBerry really didn’t have a fast/usable enough web browser to even consume as much data.

The iPhone was so popular that it was bringing Cingular’s network to its knees, especially during sports events and things like that.

But what about _Google_ or _Apple_ accessing my data? I can't prevent that, and they're some of the dodgiest corporation with the dodgiest apps in terms of privacy - after all, we know they send your data to the NSA.

I don't know about Sagem, but NEC is alive and kicking. Its glory days of the 80s are very much over, but they managed to stay on the market.

They just brought back the illusion of control.

and this then illustrates that doing things wrong were about priorities, and a better focus for user-focus was the winning play by others.

Nothing beat laying by the pool and doing a little office work on the brick.

It seems screamingly obvious that I might want to give apps access to some of my files but not all of my files. Some of my contacts but not all of my contacts. No such options exist. Many other permissions are also needlessly coarse grained for no particularly good reason.

I probably want to see apps flagged which ask for permissions which are ridiculous given what they do and justifications from developers. Not possible.

These things aren't intrinsically hard at all.

It's reasonable for a non-technical person to assume that any app whose provenance is known (thanks to the App Store's policies and requiring a valid DUNS number or similar) would be investigated & punished if they end up doing something malicious, so as long as traceability can be ensured (which it is) then it must be safe.

I myself used to think that as long as I use apps from a major brand (so like Facebook, Google, etc) I should be safe because there's no way they're going to pull spyware-like tricks and steal personal data... right?

The iOS lockscreen is a modernized version of the Today app from PalmOS. Current iOS homescreen is a slightly modified version of PalmOS homescreen to be precise.

PalmOS and Symbian are the pioneers of mobile OSes and they were pretty good at that.

The first IOS versions had quite a few limitations and a long list of stuff that it basically did not have at all. Yet it was better in only two ways:

- it had a well thought out UX; users loved that - it did not crash all the time and wasn't riddled with bugs; unlike just about anything that Nokia shipped.

There was a long list of stuff Symbian could technically do but sucked so hard at that few users actually bothered with using those things. Like using the web, taking photos and sharing them with friends, or doing some video conferencing. Technically you could do all those things but it was a combination of painfully awkward to do, unusable and extremely likely in your phone resetting randomly. All that was probably fixable technically but none of that was something Nokia was able to actually pull off due to it's management structure, priorities, and a general complete vacuum at the top in terms of leadership and vision.

Looking back, Nokia's bad decision making started around the time Linux became an obvious future choice for phones (late nineties) and just a few years ago before a tiny startup called Android actually started dreaming of making a linux & Java based phone. Instead Nokia ignored the signs of the time (and the many embedded hardware manufacturers experimenting with linux) and went for a little known 32 bit successor to 16 bit OS from the nineteen eighties and threw its weight behind it.

Google bought Android around the same time Apple kicked it's IOS efforts into gear, which was around the time I joined Nokia and also around the time Nokia Symbian phones actually started shipping in more meaningful volume (it was late and not great initially).

Symbian was not what made Nokia rich. That was actually two other platforms called S30 and S40. The S here is often confused for Symbian but actually means Series. Series 30 dates back to the early nineties and still ships in some volume in developing markets for a few dollars. That infamous indestructible Nokia phone that always comes up in Nokia nostalgia? S30. Snake, Calls, and SMS. All it did. (OK and a little WAP if you got any value out of that walled garden).

S40 started shipping around 1999 (the flip phone in the Matrix was the first model). Initially with black and white screens. Later with color screens, multi media capabilities, etc. This was the backbone of Nokia's revenue right until MS came in. Not Symbian either and actually kind of a cool OS design for its time.

Only Series 60, 80, and 90 were actually Symbian based. Nokia did not actually start shipping Symbian in volume until about 2004/2005, right when it's competition was basically going from prototype to eventual reality at Apple & Google.

The e-series phones (the ones with qwerty keyboards) were popular but comparatively a niche market. Initially that was S80 (the business variant) and later the two remaining Nokia Symbian platforms merged and S60 became the only version (initially this was positioned for multi media and gaming devices). Technically all of these were UI layers on top of Symbian. Ericsson had its own version called UIQ.

There were a quite a few flagship S60 phones that were basically variations of candy bars until after the iphone shipped. Nokia actually killed off S90 in 2005 which was intended as a touchscreen variant. Yep, that's the same year Google bought Android and Apple was moving ahead with IOS. And, yes, Nokia was well aware of those two facts (very much a public secret at the time).

For the next 3 years the only touch screen devices Nokia sold were Linux based. Only in 2007 Nokia woke up and went "oh F*" and gobbled together a company killing version of a touch screen phone on top of S60. I can't emphasize how rushed and how bad this was. Especially considering it had a perfectly good shipping Linux tablet running basically the same kernel as what later became Android.

It spent the next five years convincing consumers how much S60 didn't suck while failing repeatedly and hard. Especially a few years after Apple ate their lunch it became increasingly painful to watch. Lots of desperate moves happened during that time.

Fun fact, Nokia shipped an internet tablet running Debian Linux with X, GTK and a Mozilla Gecko based browser around 2006, almost half a decade before the ipad shipped. This thing was awesome and the reasons for it shipping without phone capabilities were entirely political and non technical (think management having a hard-on for Symbian). This little tablet eventually became a phone and then the whole MS thing happened. Meanwhile Google bought a lot of these because it basically ran the same kernel and drivers as early versions of Android and you could dual boot them to whatever; which was a nice feature to have before they shipped the first Nexus phone.

Nokia basically helped bootstrap Android but was too occupied moving deck chairs around on the sinking ship that was Symbian.

So, no, Symbian did not win.

Product engineering where the app/service is one big A/B test is how you truly figure out what your users want and need.

But isn't that how the Internet works? No one "approves" a website for release.

If anything it shows that with just a single choice and no competition, android apps just all have to do the same shity thing. Opposite of libertarian.

Apple OTOH does two major things different:

1. Apple's approach is to ask for individual permissions it needs when it first needs them. I can't overstate how much better this is than the Android all-or-nothing permission dialog.

2. Apple's permissions make more sense to users. Things like:

- Your location

- Run in background

- Your contacts

- Your photos

- The camera

Android's permissions always struck me as what engineers would do if they designed a permission system.

> Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work.

TRUE. Big true.

Honestly though I don't really see the author's point. I don't see iOS 14 and whatever the next Android version is to be back to what Symbian did.