Nokia Rolls Out QT SDK for Symbian and Meego App development

Why bother with an on store device if devs have to beg users to buy the app independently? What's the point?

More importantly, why couldn't nokia negotiate the sort of deal that apple and google have, and reduce the carriers cut? Is nokia now the whipping boy for the carriers? Have the mighty fallen that hard?
 
Jonny, no I was just saying that in many markets a lot of people buy their device unlocked and the service separately. The unlocked device comes with Ovi Store, and the user pays with his/her credit card. So the carrier does not take a cut in that case. In some countries you can either pay through carrier billing or with your credit card. Use the latter and the carrier does not get a cut.

So all I am saying is that in many countries/cases the developers cut is 70% and, if I've understood correctly, only if one decides to use carrier billing as the payment method (or if that's the only payment method available to you in case you have bought the device locked), the carrier takes a cut and the developer get's less.

So no need for developers to beg, in many cases. :)
 
I believe Apple is 70/30 as well. Of course with the dev taking 70.

Now the obvious thing for any company wanting to get caught up to Apple to do is to suddenly come out and say they'll offer 85/15 which over the next 3 years moves towards 70/30. That coupled with some devices people actually want to buy would really help a platform get caught up. I wonder why nobody has undercut Apple's pricing yet. It's definitely worth the short term cash hit to create something that could yield a decade or more of revenue.
 
Unfortunately it is not realistic in the US market sadly. The main problem being that our 3G bands are different for the 2 GSM carriers. Now if we started to get quad 3G band devices we could start to solve that problem. But however it also is necessary for a phone in this country to have the marketing and retail distribution of a carrier to succeed. Look at the Nexus One's sales number compared to Droid.

Really short of the FTC coming in to stop this kind of artificial market manipulation by carriers we don't have a hope in the US. We operate our cell phone services like landlines did in the 60s when you had to lease your phone from the service provider. I can't believe that 98% of people effectively lease their phones from their carriers. Only T-mobile is helping change that with open contract-free plans and straight installment payment plans for phones.
 
GTK still makes more sense to me, but the more I use Qt, the more I'm growing to like it.

Symbian Signed is not a big deal (what with Express Signed). It seems daunting at first, but unless you fail testing, most developers will never have to pay a test house a dime, although they still do have to get a publisher ID. Needless to say, it pays to thoroughly test your program against the symbian signed criteria if you are going to use Express Signed.

Of course, most applications will work fine self-signed, too, but then you can't distribute on Ovi Store.

I have to admit it is nice not having to deal with any of that on Maemo. Somehow I doubt things will be quite so easy come MeeGo, though.
 
Ya know, that's weird you say that because I was discussing that very subject with a developer friend.

Our mutual consensus was: If we're writing something quick and dirty, it's always going to be Objective C and GTK. If we want to be purists about it, it'd be QT. And none of that really seems to matter since most of the software we produce ends up being swing based.
 
I agree and right now there is now way nokia should be demanding more, at least not for apps developed in the u.s. market which they have no presence in.
:buddies:
 
I was wondering. Wouldn't it be beneficiary to make a "store" like Cydia on Symbian phones? Cydia has their pay method if you want to buy something from the store. Moreover, the device would need to be hacked (jailbroken) and thus no need for signed apps, correct? Just my 2 cents of course.
 
For sure it would. To me it just speaks of the apathy with which developers have towards Symbian. Nobody asked the Cydia folks to create it, they just saw the potential and went for it. Nobody wishes to do that for Symbian. The last jailbreak was basically clicking a link and visiting a webpage to download a PDF. It was 2 clicks and done in 30 seconds. These guys now have an interest in keeping the parallel app library open for business. Nobody sees the value in doing that for Symbian (yet?) even though it leads the others in marketshare. I guess they see that most Symbian users do not really use their phones as smartphones, and if they do they don't like paying for apps. Why wouldn't developers develop for the largest smartphone OS in the world?
 
I think that's pretty much the entire kit-and-kaboodle right there.

It's not that people around the world haven't bought Nokia phones or Symbian phones (though really, since Sony Ericsson also plans on dropping Symbian, Symbian is really 95% Nokia); it's that nobody really uses them as smartphones or buy few if any apps for them outside of a ring tone or an Ovi Maps download, which is free anyway.

From what I've learned, many European Nokia users are largely camera phone fanatics. They'd even be happy with a Xenon flash, 12 megapixel dumbphone.

I'm guessing that Nokia has to 'train' or push its customers to adopting them as PDAs, though a PDA type device would also help the cause. Then again, you end up at the lack of app issue once more.

It's a chicken and egg thing.
 
I'm not sure if they have train users to use it as a smartphone, users want a smartphone. They just need one that draws them into using all the features of the phone. You can't have stuff buried 7 layers into some obscure menu and expect people to find it or use it. You can give an iPhone to a 5 year old and 30 minutes later the kid will be e-mailing directions to the best Thai restaurant in town. Appeal and ease of use are key, and if Nokia hasn't understood that lesson yet then they will fail. They can't be catering to the uber geeks that think its cool that they need "leet skillz" to extract the most out of the phone. Those guys don't pay for anything anyway.
 
Way true.

Nokia's biggest stumbling block though, and I'm not sure how they get past it, is that they're a legacy HARDWARE company trying to morph into a software company. They haven't managed it well so far.

The only company that has ever really pulled that off is IBM.

Intel has been trying to do the same, even recently with the god-awful Mcafee purchase, with much less success (you can't just turn a chip fabricator into a software company; different DNA).
 
Back
Top