
Symbian Won - edent
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/06/symbian-won/
======
secondcoming
I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open
sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever
being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had
its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve
was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing
like what google and apple have today. Network operators desperately wanted an
alternative ecosystem to avoid being dependent on Android and Apple (but
mainly I believe so that they could build their own walled gardens).

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.

~~~
stiray
I loved symbian and the whole "java on phone" never seemed right to me. I
would prefer having a linux phone - I dont ask for much - working camera,
working calls, mms and sms, gps, bluetooth). I dont care for anything else.

All my hopes are now leaning into Cosmo Communicator(
[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-
communicator](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator) \- please
take care, I have jumped into this with "I will loose my money" mentality - I
still dont trust, they will realize the linux part, but hope dies last), it
reminds me of beloved Nokia Communicator and if they realize my conditions
(camera, calls, mms, sms - gps already works same as bluetooth ) I will give
my foot a very long swing and remove my Android phone (even if heavly
modified) from my life.

~~~
afandian
As an owner of a Gemini, the hardware is innovative and good enough, but the
OS is really an afterthought. You can browse their current wiki and see how
organised it is.

No disrespect to the team, it just seems like taking sufficient care of this
is a bigger job than they have the resources for.

But I'm glad I backed the kickstarter, and would do the same for something
similar in order to diversify a very un-diverse market.

~~~
stiray
I agree, but they have announced initial voice call support for linux (update
78) and this is actually quite close to what I want :)

~~~
ngcc_hk
Still cannot get back to linux. Now just an android phone with a keyboard.

------
alexwasserman
When I moved from the UK to the US in early 2006 I lost my Symbian-running
6680 Nokia, because it couldn't be ported over, it was locked to a UK network
and they refused to unlock it. I loved Symbian at the time, losing it took me
back to the dark ages.

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.

~~~
JeremyNT
I was big into Symbian before iOS and Android came around, and I was
incredibly excited to buy the N95, the (then) flagship phone. I purchased the
US variant of the phone very shortly after its launch date from the Nokia
store in NYC.

This was one of the few Symbian phones to make it to American shores with our
3G bands, and at the time it was notable for having the best camera available.

I loved the device, but the same year the original iPhone came out. On the
spec sheet it was worse in every way - no third party apps, no 3g, etc etc.
But the market spoke quickly, and the N95 became the last Nokia device I would
own.

I always thought it was a shame that the high end Nokia devices failed to
really target the US market. Usually they were lacking key frequencies, and/or
only available unlocked (without any carrier subsidies). Had Nokia been better
situated here, perhaps they could have presented some real competition to the
iPhone, but there was no way people were going to go specifically seek out an
expensive, high end Symbian phone when AT&T had subsidized iPhones and a
massive advertising blitz.

------
qwerty456127
> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started.
> Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you
> regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you
> manage access and selectively deny apps.

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.

~~~
c0l0
I respectfully disagree. Because it's an EPIC pain, and it's absolutely
hostile towards "average" users.

Back in the Android 5 (or so) days, I knew what permissions an app I was going
to install on my mother's phone was going to ask to be granted _once_, and be
done with it. Nowadays, an app might ask for some kind of new permission "on
first use", and users on mobile are developing the same habit as users of
desktop browsers during the dark ages of expired HTTPS certificates and broken
Java Applet signatures had developed out of necessity: "default-ack/OK all the
things".

The problem is that these days, even very technical people think that you
could realistically expect to lie with dogs, and get up without fleas - i.e.,
install applications and software you cannot trust, and get away without
having something bad (like loss of privacy, or maybe exfiltration of data)
happen. All thanks to "modern" security constructs like sandboxing.

But that is not going to happen - sandboxes have been shattered and broken in
the past, as they will continue to get circumvented in the future. There
simply is no replacement for _trust_ (in an application, its developers, its
distributor, and its operator (if any)), and there are no technical solutions
that could somehow replace it in full.

Yes, you can make it incrementally less bad to have a hostile agent/app on
your machine or phone, but the trouble you're trying to prevent that way will
_never_ go away completely.

I guess some people just liked to feel "in control" when clicking away their
"Norton Professional Antivirus 95 blocked 17 Viruses from damaging your
machine today!" messages back in the day, and some apparently cherish clicking
"grant 'Sexy FileManager Free Pro' access to your Photos and Videos" today.
Personally, I'm actually rather sick of it, and all the security theatre that
"modern" application delivery mechanisms like app stores/mobile platforms or
stuff like snaps/appimage/younameit would have you participate in. I'd rather
trust my distro's package maintainers to not let developers abuse their users,
and have a look at the source if I'm in doubt about the upstream's intentions.
I know I can't audit everything, but I feel like I'm much better off with that
kind of trade-off, than with the non-solution to the problem I tried to
describe above.

Edit: Removed a leftover part of a restructured sentence.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
The problem isn't the sandbox, it's inherently the issue with lack of fine
grained permissions and being unable to revoke permissions after installation.

Wanna see a real permission model, look at the BB10 Android Player model.
After installation, you could revoke permissions and the player would
basically act as if the data from that permission was just empty. App asks for
contacts, here's an empty contacts list.

Edit: I just did a small hackathon and ended up having to request full
BLUETOOTH Access and LOCATION access to connect to a label printer... how is
this long term sustainable.

~~~
com2kid
The reason for location permissions is because BT can track your location
through Bluetooth beacons. See
[https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue...](https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/bluetooth)

This is just Android being transparent. "Bluetooth usage may allow apps to
track your location." Which is perfectly true.

There has to be a balance between explaining to the user, e.g. that there are
multiple ways their location can be tracked, and permission request overload.

I don't imagine explaining to everyday users the details of the Bluetooth
protocol is viable.

------
onli
> _Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data.
> Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps._

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.

~~~
moepstar
>>> Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that?

For whatever reason, old Internet Explorers (9? 10? not sure..) do that too...

~~~
jfrunyon
The really old ones didn't even have a "remember this choice" checkbox.

~~~
dcomp
The only thing more annoying is when it ignores the remember this site
checkbox.

The current ones will ignore the remember this site probably due to a stupid
group policy.

Possibly forgets on logoff

------
arpa
I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was
absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port
issues forced me to upgrade.

~~~
bjarneh
I have two Nokia N9's (running Meego) at home still. I used N9 as my daily
driver until about 3 years ago. The failure of that magnificent OS, combined
with the failure of the successor (Jolla / Sailfish) still annoys me.

~~~
mempko
Sailfish is still around and is still getting upgrades every quarter with new
features and improvements. Android support is actually pretty good and I use
it for my daily driver.

It's not a success but it hasn't been a failure IMO.

~~~
zepearl
I used an Xperia X with Sailfish until end of 2019 but then I finally dropped
it - it mostly worked but got too much annoyed by small bugs that never got
fixed 100% (but in the meanwhile the UI got a lot of changes => that would
definitely not be my way of prioritizing work). It's a pity but personally I
think Sailfish will die.

------
npunt
Eh, not really. _Symbian was right for the wrong reasons_. They were right to
warn users about apps using internet access, but they were wrong about the
reason - it was about data caps, not privacy or security.

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/](https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/)

------
rvz
That's like saying because everyone else has 'pervasive multithreading', BeOS
won even when it was a commercial failure.

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.

~~~
mola
They innovated away privacy and security by relying on the human poor ability
of impulse control and hardship with delayed gratification. Basically they
made everything shiny and addictive. Is that really innovative? Perhaps 'bad'
ui is better when you consider higher order consequences as opposed to
concentrating only on first order popularity contest?

I'm not saying Nokia and symbian were better BTW. Just noting how our
contemporary value system where, "it makes money"="it's good" is short sighted
at times.

~~~
kanox
This is a ridiculously shallow dismisal.

Android and iOS "won" because the phones were vastly more capable.

~~~
secondcoming
Except they weren't. At the time, the US had really crap phones compared to
Europe (which itself was behind Japan). The Nokia N95 could do _everything_.
The original iPhone was pretty much laughed at by Nokia insiders because it
lacked so many features. It turns out most users didn't care about most of
these (MMS, DTV, Bluetooth)

~~~
jbverschoor
Except that they didn’t have a proper browser.

People tend to forget that you had a desktop quality browser in the first
iPhone.

~~~
secondcoming
Opera was available for it

------
Bud
This analysis elides the fact that all OSes in the Symbian era _had_ to
compulsively ask about accessing the Internet because data usage was at such a
premium.

~~~
edent
That's not completely correct. My NEC smartphones didn't. Nor did the early
BlackBerrys that I used.

~~~
LeonM
I guess that's why NEC and Blackberry never took off in Europe, as the data
usage would financially ruin you.

With prices of about 5 euro per megabyte you lived in constant fear of
accidentally using data.

~~~
dogma1138
Blackberry was quite popular in the UK amongst the corporate users, however
BBM universally came with it's own data plans and they had their software
running inside the cell providers as well as within the organization itself.

------
jokoon
I still have my nokia c2-01. It works fine, it stills takes picture, and it's
9 years old. The battery last for about 1 week or less. I do calls with a 2
euro/month plan.

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.

~~~
6510
I really liked _Viktors amazing 4 bit processor_

[http://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/13-4-bit-
proces...](http://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/13-4-bit-
processor/134-viktors-amazing-4-bit-processor-architecture)

------
maxwellito
I actually never understood why iOS and Android don't offer the same system
browsers offer for the Web. When you pick a file, the OS prompt a screen to
navigate through your pictures to pick the item you want and give it to the
webpage. Because this workflow is what most of the apps needs. I don't want
apps to have access to all my storage system, but just the picture I want to
share. The same system could be applied to contacts as well

~~~
AgloeDreams
they do, the default file picker for iOS has a 'pick file' native command that
then pops a system picker and then returns just the selected file but many
companies would rather have full access to enable their own experience. In
messaging apps, it is seeing the photos in a small view. Instagram has a full
screen browser to enable their own chosen UX.

Edit: I just saw a really neat alternative view in iOS 14 whereas the 'allow
access to photos' modal gives the option to pick and choose what photos are
'shown' by the OS.

~~~
maxwellito
Wow! It's so rare that I might have never seen it, or completely forgot about
it. However, now that you mention it, I think I remember it from my early days
on iOS.

Actually the problem is most of apps don't give you the choice between [slick
UX + loose control over your data] or [ok UX + perfect control of your data].

If I download Instagram and refuse to access my local storage, I guess I won't
be able to share a picture from my phone, right?

~~~
kalleboo
> _If I download Instagram and refuse to access my local storage, I guess I
> won 't be able to share a picture from my phone, right?_

Not from within the app, but if you go into the Photos app and share a photo
from there, you can choose to share to Instagram, and Instagram will get only
that one photo.

------
ineedasername
A very small part of the Symbian OS consisted of a useful feature that is now
similarly implemented in iOS and Android.

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

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

------
1cvmask
Symbian (and Java ME was awful as well) was not developer friendly at all till
towards the very end. By then it was too late. You never had a choice to get
rid of the annoying untrusted app pop up, and getting code-signing was a
nightmare.

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

~~~
miohtama
I worked in the mobile phone industry 00s. Besides terrible Series 60 UI,
Symbian also had non-POSIX (micro?) kernel. For example, file system was a
service and handles like a log file handle were not transferable across
threads. It made porting apps a pain. Developer tools existed, but were shit
and usual failure mode was app crashing without a reason.

Symbian had shitty developer experience because internally they did not have a
"Dev experience and third party app development" stakeholder. They had kernel,
seats for various hardware vendors, mobile and wifi standards, but not for
third party devs. Nokia itself was blind for its mistakes as in-house they
could get whatever source code or access they wanted.

Note that there were non-Symbian mobile phones as well e.g. Ericsson. So
Symbian was kind of Android, but no default UI and closed source.

~~~
kalleboo
> _Note that there were non-Symbian mobile phones as well e.g. Ericsson_

There were also multiple variants of Symbian - S60 was the Nokia UI, but
Ericsson and Motorola had Symbian UIQ, in Japan they had MOAP-Symbian

------
GekkePrutser
Another thing that Symbian did really really well was networking.

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.

------
fsckboy
it was my impression that a lot of those Symbian warnings weren't so much
trust/privacy related, but were driven simply by "european" service plans that
charged a lot of money for SMS (sending) and network data, and users were
hypersensitive to receiving huge phone bills.

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

------
garaetjjte

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

Why did early 2000' software had such obsession with asking user about secure
connection?

~~~
darksaints
More importantly, why did they ask you about secure connections, but
automatically assume that insecure connections were okay?

~~~
neurostimulant
IIRC https/tls consumes a lot of overhead back then, both on server side and
client side. These days https is so fast no one think about its overhead over
plain text connection anymore. Not sure if that's the reason for the prompt
though.

------
epx
Got depression doing Symbian development. (I am not kidding.)

~~~
alecmg
not enough information

was it related to symbian design choices?

~~~
Someone
I don’t know what the OP refers to, but using strings was ‘different’ from
doing it in other systems.
[http://descriptors.blogspot.com/](http://descriptors.blogspot.com/):

 _“Most programmers come to Symbian OS from some other development
environment, and tend to think they’ve already got strings pretty much sussed.
After all, there’s not much to C strings to understand, although there are
plenty of ways they can go wrong. The Java String and StringBuf classes have
about the best combination of power and simplicity that you can get. And the
various String and CString classes found in different flavours of C++
environments are usually mastered fairly quickly.

But then they encounter Symbian OS descriptors. If there was anything invented
to bring a high flying C++ developer firmly back to ground during their first
week of Symbian OS development, it’s descriptors.”_

~~~
epx
It was a combination of bad APIs, bad and Windows-only IDE, problems in OpenC,
and pressure from client.

For the lack of a better word, development in Symbian was "tacky", was like
walking on mud, everything took 10x the effort it should.

It was a time when Nokia was the only game in town (think N93, N95) and they
thought they could get away with mistreating developers forever.

Funny how they sabotaged their own efforts to make development easier e.g.
Python for Series 60, let alone Maemo.

~~~
cairoshikobon
iPhone is Mac-only for development. Some things never change..

------
jbverschoor
No they didn’t. They made a huge mistake: not forcing their own AppStore
globally.

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.

------
Fnoord
It is unfair to compare. An application with an offline map is different, by
design, that one where you can download the map or require a connection.
Compare TomTom and Garmin with Google Maps and Apple Maps. Which one's used
much more nowadays?

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?

~~~
criddell
It isn't about need, it's about _want_.

------
6510
We don't want _erase all data_ permission. We need only very specific
permissions. We should have custom permissions that we can get
certified/approved.

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.

------
postfacto
So in 2003, before the iPhone came out, I was a mac developer doing
Cocoa/Objective-C development.

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.”

------
TheRealPomax
This kind of reads like the exact counter-point to the title: Symbian was
doing the right thing, but in such a horrible fashion that ios and android
were able to capitalise on "we offer less friction" at the expensive of what
history has shown we had to pay for that convience. And history equally shoes
we collectively quite happily did?

------
ballenf
> Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work. It
> requires rational people to have an educated understanding of the risks they
> face. Millions of people installed dodgy apps, saw the one-time prompt, and
> lost control of their data.

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.

~~~
loxs
And also, people usually take a people-concept and apply it to tech. "It can't
work in tech, so it won't work for the market". On the contrary.
Libertarianism does not forbid a company to implement whatever jailed garden
it wants, so long as it does not force or lie to its customers. And the
problem with the lying corporations does not come from the free market, it
comes from government lobbying and protections. Regulations are only a way for
the monopolists to curb competition, nothing more.

------
dangus
I think the connection this article is trying to make is sort of a stretch.

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.

------
einpoklum
> With the latest releases of Android and iOS ... Both give you regular
> reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data.

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.

------
mwcampbell
A truly sane platform would use capability-based security with a Powerbox UI,
as Sandstorm does: [https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-06-10-network-access-
permissi...](https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-06-10-network-access-permission-
android-vs-sandstorm)

------
ttsda
Symbian was great! I got a used Nokia 6110 Navigator around 2008 (I was 12/13)
and it was mindblowing to me. It had GPS, and I could download apps from the
internet that would do stuff with the GPS and send data in real time to my
computer.

------
Tade0
_I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then
disappear._

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.

------
alex_young
Except your apps are all built using SDKs that sell your data to the highest
bidder and even if that can be mitigated, your cell company is doing the same
thing on the network level.

They just brought back the illusion of control.

------
mathgladiator
I think a better title would have been "Symbian did it right first!"

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

------
webwielder2
Or from another, more accurate, perspective, Symbian didn't win.

------
marban
I owned every generation of the Nokia 9xxx Communicator series and especially
the 9500 with Symbian 7 was a joy to use.

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

------
pydry
I don't really understand why setting up permissions for apps are seemingly so
hard get right for Android and apple. It's not complicated at all yet they
fuck it up endlessly.

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.

~~~
loxs
It's not hard per se. It's hard to do correctly only when you side with the
advertisers' interests.

------
xiconfjs
Last Symbian phone I used was a SonyEricsson P910 (Symbian UIQ3?). I loved the
on device programming - writing a script answering SMS based on content was
the best.

------
Nextgrid
The other problem here is the lack of regulation.

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?

------
jayrwren
I hope this is the stupidest thing that I read today.

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qserasera
You can’t really manage your data if you don’t include your service providers

------
bayindirh
People didn't like Symbian and PalmOS when shinier alternatives came out but,
these two OSes did a lot fundamental things correctly and efficiently.

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.

------
rbanffy
I don't remember this "decent ecosystem for developers". Did I miss something?

------
shmerl
Nokia had a chance with Meego. But internal politics killed it, and Symbain
followed.

------
jillesvangurp
I worked for Nokia between 2005-2012. During that time, roughly, it managed
itself into its own eventual demise. Symbian, it's technical limitations, and
general many spots across senior management for the types of qualities
actually valued by users kind of set the stage for both Apple and Google to
come in and disrupt the market with an initially remarkably mediocre effort:
it didn't take much to disrupt the train wreck that was Symbian.

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.

------
beamatronic
Sybian is a great product. It works well, but is a little expensive.

------
cdbattags
I believe this is the same reason why [https://hey.com](https://hey.com) will
win too.

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

------
aleken
J2ME also asked about permissions for everything. Miss that!

------
matthewaveryusa
It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

------
bglusman
Being too early is the same as being wrong.

------
matt2000
> "Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work."

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

~~~
glosses
Right, but browsers are "regulated". The attack surface that a website has
against a user is much smaller than what an app has. Or at least was, I think
websites and apps are converging now.

------
Hnrobert42
I love the word snaffle now.

------
randyrand
Mostly decent article, but one point - Android is hardly a libertarian free
for all. Google controls the way apps must ask for permission.

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.

------
cletus
I like the screenshot in this post about the permissions Android apps ask for.
At least this matches my experience. Android apps by and large just ask for
everything so it's a choice between giving them everything or not being able
to use them.

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.

~~~
danans
Android has prescribed apps to request individual permissions at runtime since
Android 6.0 (released in 2015):

[https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requestin...](https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting)

iOS switched to the runtime permission request in iOS 6 (released in 2012), so
they switched earlier than Android, but both platforms have had runtime
permissions requests for years.

