Nokia tears devs' hearts out, shutters Symbian and Meego stores early

elop speaks with forked tongue

he's a microsoft stooge who pretended to have nokia's interests at heart, when actually, he's ballmer's gimp.

http://slashdot.org/story/13/09/25/1648215/a-timely-revision-of-elops-burning-platform-memo

Nokia or Microsoft?

I think we know the answer. Kill the Symbian store in the hope developers will flock to the new Nokia barren storefront...

I think we also know what happens next.... It's called Developers all carrying on making iOS and Android apps and not caring what Microsoft screw up this week.

Save us!

Where is Martin Tasker?

I spent a number of years working for Symbian, and for Symbian licensees. In that time I met some of the cleverest, most imaginative people I've ever known (and quite often wondered what the heck I was doing there alongside them) and felt I was contributing to something rather special, which I felt genuinely proud to have played a small part in.

And this is how it ends...

In spite of being out of the "family" for quite a few years I'm genuinely sad about this.

Best wishes to everyone who was part of the Symbian story. Heaven knows that (with the benefit of hindsight) mistakes were made along the way but on the whole you have my utmost respect...

Good job

fucking up one of the greatest brands ever. Yet another promise kept, hm?

This is bad news, especially considering that a lot of people in the developing markets might be much more dependent on the store than us jaded first worlders.

Regardless: Hats off to all the Symbian and Meego developers whose tireless efforts have brougth us countless benefits over the years. Keep the good stuff coming, we'll keep paying you for it.

Under new management

As the handset business is being sold to Microsoft this is a material change in the business entity and only to be expected if not welcomed. You can be pretty sure that Microsoft is not buying the part that maintains Meego and Symbian, even though that might turn out to be somewhat short-sighted. Giving developers a helping hand port their stuff to Windows Phone and help their customers migrate would cost very little and could be good PR if, for example, some developers and customers become happy converts to the new system. But Microsoft obviously thinks it can do without "developers, developers, developers…"

As a Symbian developer myself - on the one hand, I think it is a mistake to not allow updates, and does contradict the 2016 promise. And I think that they could cut costs more effectively by just cutting the often moronic QA, and adopt a more automated application upload model like Google Play. On the other hand, well, I'm being pragmatic, I realised this day was coming sooner or later. The significant event was losing Symbian, which we've known would happen for over 2 years (although it's not like most the media even acknowledged its existence until after the fact). But actually, I wish WP well - whilst I love Android, the market does well with choice and competition. Much of the cost of losing Symbian is because of losing a massively successful OS, with that not being filled by another OS, leaving us with less choice.

This also highlights the problems of having all or most software distributed through a single site. At least it's a possibility to distribute them elsewhere though, on Symbian. This isn't going to make me flock to IOS.

"Nokia ran down most of its Symbian operation sooner than it had anticipated, as sales fell off a cliff"

I think that's a bit backwards - sales held up very well for the first year or so, and IIRC over 100 million devices were sold after the January 2011 announcement of the WP switch. And sales fell because of dropping the support - fewer new models, hardly any marketing, and no or little distribution in most countries.

"We can only surmise that someone forgot about Elop's commitment during the Nokia-Microsoft negotiations, and it fell through the cracks."

Except Nokia phones division isn't yet part of MS, so this isn't an MS decision.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

It's the same old Microsoft. Anyone surprised? Not me.

Hmm

I wonder if the store is suddenly renamed the Microsoft store so they can boost their sales stats.