News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Symbian Source Code Final Repositories from the Defunct Symbian Foundation. Parent comment

Re:Symbian Source Code Final Repositories from the Defunct S... by secondcoming on Saturday November 12, 2022 @05:14AM (#33571771)
Symbian never had a UI. Phone manufacturers were expected to build their own. There were several; Nokia’s Series 60 would be the one most are familiar with. That sucked a lot. Nokia were terrible at software.

There’s probably a business lesson in there somewhere about how your biggest customer can become synonymous with your actual product, and you get ruined by association.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Symbian Source Code Final Repositories from the Defunct S... by eliasson on Saturday November 12, 2022 @06:00AM (#33571974)
In some way they did. UIQ was a subsidary owned by Symbian that made the UI stack for Sony Ericssons P800, P900 and a few Motorola devices.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Symbian Source Code Final Repositories from the Defunct S... by vesinisa on Saturday November 12, 2022 @06:01AM (#33571977)
Nokia actually bought Qt to help them make a modern GUI, and had Qt/QML ported to Symbian S60. I was fortunate enough to develop a few apps on it back in the day and surprisingly - it didn't suck.

QML remains to this day superior framework to native Android UI development. Only Jetpack Compose, and SwiftUI on iOS, are starting to come on par with what Nokia had with Qt/QML over a decade ago.

Nokia actually had all the right pieces (Qt, Maemo/MeeGo, Symbian for feature phones, unparalleled engineering and manufacturing talent) for continuing their world domination, but their management was just laughably bad. It was all lost to in-fighting between teams and an inefficient middle manager heavy corporate culture it seems.

[ Parent | on HN ]