Samsung confirms it will drop Symbian this year
No more apps support after year end, focuses on Android, bada and WP7
Published: 5 October, 2010
Samsung had already dropped strong hints that it would not support Symbian in this smartphone generation, and now it has confirmed the news, hard on the heels of a similar announcement from Sony Ericsson, and in the same week that the Korean giant said it would launch Windows Phone 7 handsets before year end.
Like compatriot LG, Samsung will now focus its nascent smartphone efforts on Android and WP7, leaving Nokia (and the Japanese vendors) as the supporters of the reworked and open source Symbian^3. Samsung is also investing heavily in its homegrown platform, bada.
Samsung said it would stop supporting Symbian at the end of this year, in a note on the web site of its developer program, Samsung Mobile Innovator. It said Innovator "will discontinue its Symbian support service from December 31 2010.... Registration and certification of Symbian applications for the Samsung Apps store will cease."
This was no surprise, given that Samsung VPs said recently that they saw little current demand for Symbian. Despite reports that the Korean vendor would pip Nokia's N8 to the post with the first Symbian^3 launch, it has not unveiled a device for the OS since February.
The firm has traditionally supported almost all operating systems on the market, but has recently been modifying its scattergun development approach in favour of reducing and prioritizing its efforts around a few key platforms. Bada is positioned for the midmarket and for phones that are more tightly controlled by Samsung than the Android models, providing successors to its traditional line-ups of highly featured but closed media handsets.
Samsung, like Sony Ericsson, remains a member of the Symbian Foundation and insiders said it would keep a watching brief on the OS and reintroduce it to the range should demand warrant this. However, for now, the platform is relying almost entirely on Nokia - admittedly a major asset, given its 40% smartphone market share, but otherwise in the awkward position of webOS, open source but single-vendor. Reducing the perceived control of Symbian by Nokia, which could deter rivals from supporting it, was a key goal of the Finnish vendor acquiring the platform and then putting it into an open source foundation.
However, Nokia is expected to ship about 50m Symbian handsets over the next 12 months and Symbian^4 will enhance the user and developer experience further next year.
More SAMSUNG News
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- Samsung Focus 2 arrives at AT&T - May 21
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