Oh no, I can't buy the overpriced feature phone that can't even perform basic tasks like blocking ads, whatever will I do-!
Flippin' Symbian phones from early 2010's are more capable and yet they are the ones we call "dumbphones"...
Flippin' Symbian phones from early 2010's are more capable and yet they are the ones we call "dumbphones"...
As a person who used them then and still have a few working that I turn on now and then, this is nostalgic bunk. Symbian phone hardware & software SDK were a disorganized mess. By 2010, Symbian phones were stagnant and the market was mostly abandoned.
The Symbian OS had promise, but it was not realized. There is a reason the 2007 iPhone totally disrupted PalmPC/PalmOS/webOS/Symbian and wiped them from the landscape.
You could convince a user to turn off this code-signing requirement by having them alter the firmware on their device; not exactly friendly for sideloading
Self-signed symbian apps:
- had no lasting persmissions... EVERY single time a self-signed app did something like use network or bluetooth, the user gets a popup... every.single.time
- had no background task ability; save before you switch apps! and music players? nope.
- could not write to or browse the general phone filesystem - could only write to files created BY that app
- could not use any of the phone functions (call records, making calls, filtering calls, recording calls, SMS/MMS)
- had no kernel access for any access to custom plugins or methods outside the official SDK
The self-signing tools provided for Symbian devs were MakeKeys and SignSIS & barely worked then. Nowdays, getting them to work takes a dark art incantation and rolling your VM back in time a few decades.
Symbian was a shaky, shortsighted OS that switched directions in software and hardware multiple times before finding a lane that it quickly abandoned.
As for permission dialogs in particular, there is no facility, at least not in S^3 and above to display any kind of runtime permission dialogs. Maybe you're thinking of some other OS that isn't Symbian.
Furthermore, there is no mechanism for app ownership of files outside of app directories either. And writing to common fs directories is definitely allowed for self-signed apps that specify an appropriate permission.
Overall, I sense you don't like being wrong, but you are not wrong, you're just talking about some other non-Symbian OS I don't really know, so I can't really say much about that…
I suppose there was no need to mention Symbian. It was a hellish system to develop for, and once smartphones had a little more RAM and CPU power, Symbian had absolutely no future. Nokia's answer to the iPhone was MeeGo [0], which wasn't bad, but Google's Android was, in fact, even better.
More like it was around three years earlier to the market, and already had a huge network of users, developers and apps.