Yes Symbian C++ was a pain and the Codewarrior replaced by Eclipse with CDT (attempt 1), replaced by Carbide (Eclipse CDT attempt 2), augmented with PIPS, extended with Qt, on top of Perl and BASH scripts wasn't very fun to use, if at all.
Recall that Nokia blog post that was quickly removed, about only devs that get paid would develop for Symbian?
When version 3 came out I was expecting Symbian C++ would be replaced by proper C++, given the overhaul the system got for security support.
Yet, the OS itself with its mikro-kernel architecture, C++ instead of C, task based architecture and security model was quite interesting from OS architecture point of view.
The updated Belle version was quite a joy to use on my Nokia C6-01.
That all sounds oddly similar to a bunch of reasoning going on in the FOSS world right now.
If I remember rightly, the real innovation was the "app store" (even if that came slightly after the iPhone launch). It was surprisingly hard to actually get S60 apps.
In Europe it was quite easy, as most operators had their own store and even Ovi Store was available since 2007, one year early than iPhone's one.
Re:Android permissions and hypocrisy
by willvarfar on Monday January 23, 2017 @07:57AM
(#13461848)
When the iphone was launched you couldn't make native apps.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/13/2612736/ios-history-iphon...
What the iphone1 did was look and feel gorgeous. It was entirely the user experience that made it an obvious winner that made Symbian obsolete overnight.
Only for those that did not use a Nokia N95, Nokia Communicator or Nokia 7700 (one of the first touch screen mobiles), hence why I was hardly convinced back then.
Re:Android permissions and hypocrisy
by willvarfar on Monday January 23, 2017 @10:39AM
(#13462889)
And I was saying the iphone didn't start out with an appstore...
S60 was a horrid codebase and very hard to wrangle into modern things.
UIQ was a cleaner smaller codebase where the main big apps (e.g. messaging) didn't actually use the latest greatest parts of the framework. UIQ was always being dragged in opposing directions by its two big owners - Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Sony Ericsson had some success with their early P800 and just wanted to keep on iterating that with the P900 etc, whereas Motorola wanted smarter feature phones and features like keypad navigation. Neither wanted capacitive touch, despite UIQ suggesting it umpteen times.
The Symbian codebase was an antiquated C++ dialect. I happened to have liked it, and found it very expressive and powerful and simple, but there was definitely a learning curve.
When the iphone came along it was so simple and beautiful and had a capacitive screen and basically everything else was obsolete immediately.
Android was unreleased and actually had an extensional crisis at that point, but they quickly revamped it to be more iphone-like and launched.
At that point everyone else thought "android will be cheaper to develop!" and dropped Symbian just as quick as they could.
And I don't blame them.