Intense competition from Android and iOS is often highlighted as the chief cause for the rapid decline in popularity of Symbian. There are plenty of other factors that contributed to the downfall of this mobile platform too, and we take a look at some of them here.
The Symbian mobile operating platform had a lot of things going for it. Launched in 1998, the OS definitely had the first-mover’s advantage in the internet-enabled handset market, and even had the backing of major players like Nokia and Samsung. The general battery backup feature of Symbian was also relatively high – something that can’t be asserted about most of its more successful competitors. All this makes the spectacular fall of the Symbian OS an interesting study. We here try to pinpoint the causes that led to the ultimate demise of Symbian:
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Poor internet performance – Mobile web surfing is all about speed (at least for most users), and Symbian fails miserably on this count. On handsets powered by this mobile platform, it became almost imperative for people to download a third-party browser app, to be able to access the web. Even so, the internet speed was nowhere close to the sophisticated iOS or Android devices.
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Failure to gain advantage from being open-source – Open-source software applications generally get a headstart over competitors – but such was not the case with the Symbian OS. In fact, when Symbian first came into being (from Psion Software) – it had hardly any competitors from the same market niche. When other players did start to arrive (e.g., the arrival of iPhone in 2007), Symbian was just not prepared to keep up.
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The unsatisfactory app-availability – Hardcore Symbian fanboys/girls would argue that there are well over ten thousand mobile applications native to the Symbian platform. However, the fact that it took the OS as many as seven years to reach that mark also has to be taken into account. Compare the scenario with that in iTunes, where the app-count is already in excess of one million – and iPhone application development companies in India and overseas releasing many new apps every quarter – and you get the picture.
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Developers started to hate Symbian – The intricate, often downright complex, ANSI and STL-based codes for Symbian were something the developers took pride in during the early 2000s – but the love story soon turned sour. The extension for the Behemoth API was an absolute washout, and the system experts struggled to resolve even relatively simple handset problems. Compared to Symbian, the Android and the iOS codes are way simpler.
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The boring user-interface (UI) – Symbian initially wowed first-time users of the Nokia E-series and N-series phones. As the popularity of these handsets waned, so did the charms of the mobile operating platform. Those in charge of maintaining Symbian made hardly any efforts to upgrade the UI and include more dynamic features in it. The OS made the mistake of remaining static, and hitherto loyal users soon got bored with it.
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Did Symbian ever really target the smartphone market? – Symbian was the pioneering handset for mobile phones and PDAs, but it hardly had any focused functionality/support for smartphones/feature phones. As internet-enabled devices grew in popularity, people stopped remaining content with the high stability features that Symbian offered. Even Nokia – Symbian’s long-standing partner, ditched it in favor of the Windows Phone – underlining the Finnish company’s lack of confidence in Symbian. Windows Phone has also flopped, but that’s a separate issue altogether.
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The presence of four alternative user interface systems – The frustrations of experts from mobile app development companies stemmed not only from the difficulty of coding. Symbian OS had, at one time, four different UI systems (S90, S60, S80 and UIQ) – and applications developed for one of them could not be used on the others. Even the underlying app codes were not reusable. Symbian also faced an unexpected competition from Nokia’s very own NOS/S40 platform.
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The perceived lack of profitability – Android has the Google Play Store, iPhone/iPad has the iTunes store – but there was no such systematic channel for app-sales and revenue-generation for Symbian apps (the Ovi Store came too late). Manufacturers, in fact, had to compete with each other, to promote their mobile applications. When other mobile platforms, with their higher profitability potentials, came calling, the disgruntled marketers did not need much added incentive to bid adieu to Symbian.
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Frequent screen freezes and call drops – Nokia E7 and N8 were two of the most high-end Symbian handsets in the late-2000s, and neither of them provided that seamless mobile handling experience that iPhones and Android phones now offer. The general operational speed of Symbian was rather ho-hum, and there were complaints about devices getting hung due to no apparent cause. Cases of calls getting dropped on Symbian-powered phones were also not uncommon.
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The unmanageable network of Symbian partners – The frustratingly long time-lags between planning and implementing an update on the Symbian platform did not help either. For instance, to port Symbian products on a new carrier, approvals had to be taken from literally thousands of partner companies. The mobile app designing themes and system architecture of Symbian were already creaking – and this uncalled-for bureaucracy totally killed it of.
In the late-90s and the early-2000s, when Real Time Operating Systems for PDAs were in vogue, Symbian OS ruled the market. Thanks a combination of poor maintenance, over complicated coding, and a total failure to keep up with the latest smartphone market trends, the platform is in a truly dismal position now. Symbian is currently maintained by Accenture – but after 2016, whether it would continue to exist remains a question.
Hussain Fakhruddin
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