I previously wrote on this subject a year ago, when Android was announced, and three years ago, when I was really disappointed by a pretty much dead S60 applications market.

This time it started with a great presentation by Teemu Kurppa (a mastermind behind mobile Jaiku) at MobileDevCamp Helsinki – “Platform = Stage. How to choose a mobile development platform?“. It is a must see for every mobile developer.

Teemu compares the number of “educated users” for S60, iPhone and J2ME enabled phones, and illustrates that they are cardinally different from absolute numbers of sold devices/potential customers advertised by companies behind those technologies.

Even if iPhone/iPod Touch has the smallest number of sold devices, it has 3x times the number of “educated users” than its nearest competitor (S60), and “educated users” are the real potential customers with the money and intention to buy.

Teemu also compares the distribution channels – Apple App Store vs. S60 Download and user experience when downloading and installing applications.

By far iPhone/iPod Touch coupled with App Store is the absolute winner as a development platform, if you want to maximize your target audience and profits. But there will be two major disruptions this year, trigerring a ripple effect in mobile development pond – Nokia’s global Ovi Store launch and Google’s Android Market launch in Europe.

However as Ewan MacLeod reports Nokia’s Ovi Store got more than a cold reception from mobile developers in the Bay Area, who were unimpressed by “400 million Ovi compatible handsets by Dec 2010″ proposition.

Mike Rowehl in his rant “Please Don’t Mistake My Apathy For A Lack of Understanding” explains the reasons behind his choice of iPhone as a preferred development platform. Addressing Nokia, RIM and Microsoft, Mike wrote “Once things change, once you get your stores developed, released, and proven as a good commercial channels to end users – then we can talk again. Until then we’re all just going to keep laughing at you and developing for iPhone”. He got a reassuring comment from Lee Williams, executive director of Symbian Foundation, which I do hope is the first sign that at least Nokia starts caring about developer’s needs.

iPhone was the buzzword of 2008, but I am still closely following Google’s Android development. I was really impressed by a successful example of one of my friends, who concepted, developed and published mobile application for Android in about a month of evening coding – without any prior mobile development experience, let alone Android experience. Android documentation and community, encouraged and supported by Google, allowed this to happen.

Apple’s App Store success (1 bln downloads quoted) indicates that there is a lot of moeny in 3rd party application market, and there will be a fierce competition between Google, Apple and Nokia for developers attention. The one that succeeds will have to forget about having the largest number of devices on the market, and concentrate on three really important things:

• providing a good distribution channel with a fair revenue split
• educating users about possibility to install mobile applications
• creating a decent development platform, with a good toolset, comprehensive documentation and active community

With Apple being now a clear leader, and Android a strong challenger with large potential, it is going to be an uphill battle for Nokia to regain trust of mobile developers and deliver on promises of Symbian Foundation and Ovi Store.

Personally, I think this is great news. An open mobile platform is something that was long due to stir up the world of RIM-Windows-Symbian.

Android managed to get many things right from the very beginning, things that took several years for S60. While S60 initially took Microsoft-style approach to development community – with multi-level support, exclusive club membership with access to the source code, signing and licensing, Android is quite open and democratic.

When Google announced Android SDK – my first thoughts were – it’s a smart move to release SDK before devices are available. Google’s name alone would be enough to attract developers and hackers to this new platform, so they can create a developer community by the time devices are shipping. Then Google announced developer challenge with $10mln in awards.

Who wouldn’t like to try? And we didn’t have to wait long for examples. Moscow-based startup company Sadko announced Android application CallFreq – a smart dialer application.

Ukranian software house OreDale offers to implement your ideas for Android developer challenge for a reasonable compensation.

Android freeware directory already features 21 application.

What is it that I liked so much about Android? Mostly things that I complained about in Symbian/S60.

• SDK

On November 12th, 2007 when first Android SDK release appeared on the web I downloaded and installed it on my Linux machine. Size of the SDK was more that reasonable – 54Mb. Emulator startup was fast. There were plenty of sample applications illustrating APIs. Installing Android plugin for Eclipse was simple. Debugging and tracing tools were also in the pack.

Unfortunately developing for S60 in Linux is still not an easy ride. S60 v3 FP1 SDK for Windows is 354Mb, which still might be a problem if you don’t have fast internet.

• Developer support

Google got Android developer support under control from the very beginning – forums, blogs, online SDK documentation, API examples, application examples, video tutorials, – all on http://code.google.com/android.

• Software development – learning curve

If you ever developed for Symbian OS, you know that you have to learn a lot of new stuff – what are the basic types in C++, how to work with strings, how to implement multithreading, how client/server works, how Symbian database management system works, etc. Unfortunately entry barrier for Symbian development is high.

Android, even though it is a Linux based OS, has chosen Java as the main programming language and Sqlite as DBMS solution. If you know Java, you can start coding for Android already today.

I wrote about issues related to software development on S60 platform in “Do we really have a mobile development platform?“.

Nokia has taken several steps in order to make development for S60 easier and lower the entry barrier – such as Open C and Python.

But as Michael Mace writes in his “Google, the OS company blogpost about Android impact on Symbain“It’s not fun competing against a free product that’s been subsidized by one of the richest companies in the world (just ask Netscape).”

• Security and openness

I wrote about S60/Symbian platform security issues in “Symbian OS Platform Security – good or evil?“.

Android’s approach to security is along the lines – let the user decide. Application defines which permissions it requires – and user grants these permissions when the application is installed on the device.

Let’s see what it turns out to be in the real world – in “At application install time, permissions requested by the application are granted to it by the package installer, based on checks with trusted authorities and interaction with the user.” statement “trusted authorities” is a subject for concern.

• Developer perspective

I can recommend an excellent artile by John Lombardo “A developer’s perspective on Google’s Android” that describes first-time user (developer) experience with Android.

• Consumer perspective

From a consumer perspective Android appears to be a well designed platform that can be easily extended. At the moment it has less default applications than S60 platform, but firstly, that will be compensated by 3rd party developers (especially since “all applications are equal” idea is core to Android ideology), and secondly, Android provides a powerful browser based on Apple’s WebKit browser engine (same as used in iPhone and newer S60 phones), which would allow users take advantage of all internet services offered by Google.

• Open Handset Alliance

Open Handset Alliance established by Google caused a mixed reaction from Nokia.

Helsingin Sanomat wrote that: ” Nokia feels that Android, a mobile telephony alliance announced on Monday by Google, is unnecessary because Nokia has already been doing nearly everything that the alliance is just talking about. Nokia says that its S60 platform, which is based on its own Symbian operating system, is the best and most workable foundation for Internet services of mobile telephones”.

On the other hand Kari Tuutti, spokesman for Nokia Multimedia, said that Nokia joining Open andset Alliance is not ruled out at all.

Conclusion:

Android is a new guy on the block, and it is not all roses. It still has to survive the harsh reality of hardware products manufactuing world and maintaining API compatibility between versions and devices in order to establish itself as a real platform. Because of the Apache license used for Android SDK “applications designed to be compatible with Google’s platform could be made incompatible with a particular device, by a handset vendor who removes core Android APIs and replaces them with their own closed source alternative“.

Integration with the real hardware can bring more surprises than anticipated by a company with software background. So I wouldn’t count on seeing first Android devices earlier than Christmas 08.

Google got many things right and made a very good start. Android looks quite promising, and Google seems to be quite serious about making it world leading mobile platform. At the same time Nokia has an established platform, a huge base of S60 devices already on the market and talented S60 R&D team.

Year 2008 promises to be very interesting.

(Via: Gábor Török and Antony Pranata)

Well, hacked – sort of. Apparenlty it is possible to obtain AllFiles capability for your applications by changing a few lines in Nokia Software Update files and flashing your phone, as described here.

For developers that means that with certain amount of effort they will be able to make their life a bit easier and explore previously hidden features of SymbianOS.

For hackers that means that they can access data cages of all applications on a stolen phone (e.g. with Y-Browser with AllFiles capability) and extract passwords from configuration files (e.g. e-mail, IM client, browser, virtually all applications that access internet services and store passwords on the mobile without encryption)

This is the first publicly available evidence of a possibility for 3rd parties to obtain AllFiles and other capabilities available only to phone manufacturers. Symbian Platform Security was considered to be “unbreakable” by far, and technically it still is – the blunder is really on NSU part.

But I don’t want this to be yet another post about how bad the PlatSec is, and the reason for that is that I believe it actually is a good thing. Here are some facts.

The idea behind PlatSec as described in marketing materials is pretty good: “a fine-grained way to efficiently restrict or completely prevent unauthorised access to sensitive APIs and data on the mobile phone while keeping the device open to developers”. The reality however proves to be quite different.

Platform security is often misunderstood as an ultimate protection from viruses and all kinds if malicious software. But here’s the first report about an application signed by Symbian that is a spyware.

Antony Pranata has an excellent piece on antivirus software for SymbianOS 9.x “Do We Need Anti Virus for Symbian OS 9 Devices?“.

Gábor Török in his blog post “Symbian Signed is not an anti-virus software” explains that “signing has not much to do with protection against malicious programs“. Certification is not about security, it is about being able to trace the problem back to the developer.

But what is such security good for if you can get a signed spyware application?
As Gábor writes “For example, the author’s certificate can be revoked and added to a list, called Certificate Revocation List or CRL for short”. The problem is however that CRL is not supported as of yet in S60 3rd Edition.

Gábor Török and Simon Judge write about developers shipping unsigned applications, so that advanced users can do the signing themselves using their own developer certificates becoming a common practice.

Why this can possibly be happening?

In “Do you think that PlatSec signing process is a nightmare?” Gábor writes more about it. And I have to answer YES to his question.

Here are some examples of issues with and around Symbian OS Platform Security implementation:

“Symbian is not an Idiot” and “Symbian Signed, Please Enable Me” by Antony Pranata where he rants about the delays in getting developer certificate for his new Nokia phone.

“Is Symbian Trying to Kill Off Small Developers?” by “Symbian In Motion”

“Death Of The Bedroom Coder” part 1 and part 2 by Chris Woods where he describes process and provides expenses calculation for an individual to release a Symbian application.

To summarize:

Platform Security hinders development process on S60 platform, especially for small independent software companies/individual programmers. It prohibits students or any other developers who can’t affort the signing process to write shareware software for S60. In addition to all other problems developers experience with the platform it just turns them away from Symbian.

Yes, Symbian provides free certification for freeware applications, but sometimes that’s simply not fast enough. If you want to interact with your users and make them happy, you would need to deliver fixes and new features for your software without additional delays.

We have a system that discourages independent developers, slows down freeware distribution, and does not prevent malicious software from spying on you or destroying your phone. What is the point? That suites well only operators that work closely together with Symbian powered device manufacturers and can put “trusted” label on their software, but it does not benefit developers at all.

Coupled with the fact that mobile application sales are dropping one can see a gloom future for the independent application development on Symbian.

As I said in the beginning – I think that Platform Security is a good thing. I really do – in the world where Nokia wants to be able to easily extend functionality of its phones by itself or provide such possibility to selected partners.

Having spent last 8 years of my life working with Symbian OS, it pains me to say that if I were a beginning developer now looking at what OS to start developing for – I wouldn’t bother about Symbian and go for mobile Linux.