The Symbian Foundation today announced the first details of Symbian Horizon, an application-publishing program, which aims to reduce the barriers developers face when taking their products to market and thus increase the profitability of creating Symbian applications. Symbian Horizon will place applications in a number of partner app stores including Nokia's Ovi Store, Samsung's Application Store and AT&T's MEdia Mall, effectively acting as an application publisher on behalf of developers.
Read on in the full article.
This announcement even made it onto the front page of BBC News' technology section:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8152443.stm
Is this a unilateral Symbian thing or are Nokia putting hteir shoulders into this?
This is a Symbian Foundation iniative. Nokia are one of the partner app stores though Ovi, but it'll be the Symbina Foundation running things and doing the work.
With the move to the Foundation status Symbian has a lot more freedom of movement and this is a good example of the result.
As Rafe says, Symbian's role in this is a publisher, while Nokia's role is more like a retailer. Nokia would be the service the consumers see, but Symbian would be at the developer end of things.