Also not great examples.
One of the main reasons webOS and Symbian died (including Windows Phone by the way) is because they barely had any apps and developers didn’t want to build for those platforms.
Because either the developer APIs were bad, the hardware was slow or there weren’t many people around on those platforms.
Microsoft tried to incentivise developers, but it didn’t work.
And consumers didn’t want to stick around those platforms.
So it shown us that:
- people want to stick on platforms with active developers
- developers want to develop for platforms with great APIs, hardware and great distribution
RIM, Nokia and Palm tried, burned billions, but the market (via consumers and developers) has spoken, and made Apple right - people care about experience, whether they are people that consume or build the software.
It’s no easy feat for new entrants (Google & Apple) to dethrone existing mammoths.
But they’ve done it and turned others into history and a business lesson about innovation and changing the status quo.
They had a single rule for developers - we’ll charge you fee for our work (R&D, APIs, software, hardware, distribution, handling payments and taxes worldwide).
Developers voluntarily agreed and chosen Apple (then Google) instead of what RIM, Nokia and Palm offered.
In the end I feel it was the right decision, everyone won.
Now, after history’s been made and unsuccessful platform and models died out, developers (companies) decided to change their mind: "Hey, remember how we agreed to your rules and changed the world together? Well, we want to go back to the days of no distribution and marketplace fees, but still have access to the best hardware and billion people on your platforms. We don't care that it's normal for other marketplaces to charge 30-50% fees (Walmart/PlayStation), you're a monopoly!" (even though we know Apple is not a monopoly, and developers played a huge part in demise of the 3rd player in the market - Microsoft) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It was the burning memo that destroyed all trusth from third parties.
The transition to Qt/PIPS was the third of its kind, so most just decided "I am out of here".
I used my Symbian Belle device until that stoped being an option.
Nonsense, I had a Palm Pre with webOS in 2009 and at that time it had an official App Catalog and you could add third-party repositories to it. PreWare[1] was amazing, and made the Pre one of the best phones I've ever had.
Before that I had a Nokia N900 with Maemo/Meego. It had an app store based on apt, and you could add third-party repositories to it, as well.
> Mobile operators controlled the market and software on the phones everywhere.
They certainly didn't on the Pre, Pre 2 or N900. I had more freedom to install software on my phone in 2010 than I do now with a modern iPhone or iPad.
> If you would tell anyone 15 years ago that they would be able to sell software on a digital shelf where 1 billion people can find and purchase it in under 30 seconds, they wouldn't believe you.
Steam's store existed in 2005.
[1] https://webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware