Symbian OS now powers 7% of all phones sold

Correct me if I'm wrong, but 7% is still a pretty small number.

It depends how you look at it! 😊

7% is a lot when you consider that it's 7% of ALL phone sales, including the cheapest and simplest models, and over 1 billion phones are sold every year.

You also have to remember that 90% of phone users don't use any kind of smartphone at all, so getting 7% of the total phone market means getting 70% of the smartphone market.

I agree that smartphones are something of a red herring though, the really significant phone models are the ones that are cheap enough for anyone to afford, even people in relatively poor countries.

krisse wrote:It depends how you look at it! 😊

7% is a lot when you consider that it's 7% of ALL phone sales, including the cheapest and simplest models, and over 1 billion phones are sold every year.

You also have to remember that 90% of phone users don't use any kind of smartphone at all, so getting 7% of the total phone market means getting 70% of the smartphone market.

I agree that smartphones are something of a red herring though, the really significant phone models are the ones that are cheap enough for anyone to afford, even people in relatively poor countries.

7% may represent a large absolute number, but from a developer's perspective, it is a small percentage. A lot of those non-smartphones can also run s/w applications (those that run brew, for example) and the difference between 7% and 93% is massive (not that 93% is a single platform, but still) - so much so that it's almost pointless to even consider developing the 7%.

I wonder how the 93% is split up - that might be a more significant comparison.

For a more detailed breakdown see Peter Judge's article on Techworld - http://www.techworld.com/mobility/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=812&blogid=19 - which includes a table used by Nigel Clifford in a presentation he gave today.

> For a more detailed breakdown see Peter Judge's article on Techworld -
> http://www.techworld.com/mobility/bl...=812&blogid=19 - which includes a table
> used by Nigel Clifford in a presentation he gave today.

AFAICT, that's only covering the 7%. I'm interested in the other 93%.

Max.

7% may represent a large absolute number, but from a developer's perspective, it is a small percentage. A lot of those non-smartphones can also run s/w applications (those that run brew, for example) and the difference between 7% and 93% is massive (not that 93% is a single platform, but still) - so much so that it's almost pointless to even consider developing the 7%.

Not true. If you were familiar with cross platform mobile development you'd realise this is still hugely significant. There are enough Symbian powered phones in the world nowadays to make it a very significant platform to develop for - the other end of the scale from "pointless".

If you were experienced in mobile, you'd know that although 93% vs. 7% looks enormously attractive, you are extremely limited in development options to hit any significant mass of these 93% of other phones. You basically have two choices - very limited mobile web pages made of WAP or XHTML with just text and limited graphics, and no animation, let alone a proper "program", or java which is the most fragmented nightmare on the planet to develop for, and where you can only hit a minor subset of phones, without vast time, effort and money spent on porting and debugging on individual handset models. Some 50% of java development costs are spent on this these days.

Symbian offer power and a stable and very capable platform, and they belong to premium users, who are more likely to spend more on extra software, and are known to have significantly higher data and browsing usage.

Alex Kerr
CEO
phonething.com

ajck wrote:7% may represent a large absolute number, but from a developer's perspective, it is a small percentage. A lot of those non-smartphones can also run s/w applications (those that run brew, for example) and the difference between 7% and 93% is massive (not that 93% is a single platform, but still) - so much so that it's almost pointless to even consider developing the 7%.

Not true. If you were familiar with cross platform mobile development you'd realise this is still hugely significant. There are enough Symbian powered phones in the world nowadays to make it a very significant platform to develop for - the other end of the scale from "pointless".

Well, perhaps my statement was a little strong, but it is still far from the biggest platform, at least in some markets.

How long that will remain true (if indeed it is true - I have no data to quote either way) is another matter - I hope it will change too.

If you were experienced in mobile, you'd know that although 93% vs. 7% looks enormously attractive, you are extremely limited in development options to hit any significant mass of these 93% of other phones.

Well, I already mentioned BREW, which already has a larger market share than Symbian, but...

You basically have two choices - very limited mobile web pages made of WAP or XHTML with just text and limited graphics, and no animation, let alone a proper "program", or java which is the most fragmented nightmare on the planet to develop for, and where you can only hit a minor subset of phones, without vast time, effort and money spent on porting and debugging on individual handset models. Some 50% of java development costs are spent on this these days.

Symbian offer power and a stable and very capable platform, and they belong to premium users, who are more likely to spend more on extra software, and are known to have significantly higher data and browsing usage.

Indeed, what you say has *some* truth, in that the development on Symbian is much better than most of the established platforms[1] with (some of) the others requiring customisation between phones. However, to sugest that the others are limited to just basic web pages is wrong. One of my company's applications had full 3D OpenGL ES graphics (written in C++) on a largish number of brew phones (ie not smartphones) - it works and is impressive. It *is* possible to innovate on basic phones despite their limitations.

IMO, it all comes down to business models and marketing. Since the Symbian market is so small, it is quite difficult to charge little or nothing for an application and/or content. Our model for our S60 application (even smaller than Symbian) has been to give the application away for free, but charge for the content that you can use in the application (as well as some teasers). This has quite a lot of advantages from a marketing perspective (similar to a demo, but permanent), but some things make it impractical. The small Symbian market means we can't get to the huge numbers needed to make a profit, and also there seems to be no easy way to charge customers for cheap content while keeping costs low (ie royalty based) and making it easy for the customer. The only way to do this that we've found is to distribute via a service provider and that really limits the scope, not to mention that you have to fit in with their way of doing things/etc/etc, which means more engineering and maintenance costs, not to mention other factors like them choosing to not do business with you at all (like in Japan).

I was really hoping that this new Nokia advertising powered download thing would work for what we want to do - it had the promise of being completely free for the user (ie *very* easy to buy) and a single service provider (low engineering/maintenance). This is what I'm talking about.
Unfortunately, after the beta, things seem to have gone quiet - the one comment is mine :|

So, yes, I pretty much agree with you in so much as it's not nearly as black and white as I made out, and my comment really only applies to my company's business model for it's S60 application (well, perhaps others too). It's just been a headache, that's all.

Max.

[1] it is still far from ideal, and, IMO, will (I hope) be surpassed in that respect by other more recent platforms.