Mobitopia

A couple of weeks ago, the kind folks over at Mobitopia invited me to join their esteemed ranks, and today, I finally made my debut. You can read the article here.

developer.symbian.com Redux

I’ve been mulling over Ewan’s recent posting regarding Symbian’s approach to managing their developer program, but I’m going to go a bit further and question Symbian’s future based on said approach.

Everything Ewan says is exactly right, with the exception of this seemingly innocuous statement:

Nobody really wants to spend a huge amount of time and money doing it

Symbian should absolutely spend time, money and a whole load of effort on their developer program.

A recent posting by Joel Spolsky gives a great example of how a developer program should be run, and Symbian need to be aware that Microsoft will (and are) applying this same approach in the mobile space, making sure that developers have all the latest information and everything they need to get started at a very reasonable rate.

Symbian will claim that they do this via their partner program, but look here to see what that offers. Nothing much of interest, and that’s just not good enough—especially for $1,000! Here are some of my own suggestions as to how they might start fixing this apalling state of affairs:

• Symbian need to hire some people as their Developer Relations team, if they don’t already have such an initiative;
• Each and every device licensee (e.g., Nokia, Siemens, Sendo, et al) should second a group to this team;
• The team can be geographically dispersed, but should of course meet regularly “for real”;
• Each device licensee should move all their information, sample code, tools, and so on across to the new Symbian hosted site, redirecting from their own sites where appropriate, providing a single point of contact for developers;
• Handsets should be available in copious quantities to developers who sign up to the “professional” developer program, thus seeding the market;
• The team should work to provide detailed documentation about porting between Series 60 and UIQ, for example, what the differences are between handsets, and how to best create applications which can be quickly ported across all handsets;
• The team should be highly visible, not just in terms of responding to queries or monitoring newsgroups/forums, but in terms of calling developers up, and talking with them.

The Developer Days are a good intiative, but more — so much more — can and needs to be done. I know that a worst case scenario for Symbian is (probably) that it is subsumed by Nokia, but I don’t want that to happen. Microsoft understand that a platform succeeds not through top-down dictatorship (that’s merely how you maintain the success…), but through seeding the market, creating a viable economy for third-party ISVs to succeed, thus driving greater demand for the platform because the applications are there, thus driving higher demand for the applications, and so on.

So my message to Symbian should be pretty clear: “You can’t afford not to do this”...