Damn, I have to deliver an argument . I am only a developer, but my gut feeling is that almost all windows-only apps are written in c# with Windows Forms/WPF or c++ with MFC. But I assume cross-platform apps are a small part of the market, so maybe I'm wrong.

I hate to keep quoting you but you said for synergy to bloom there needs to be more devices, non-Symbian Qt devices. I'm not aware of any other besides MeeGo since the N900 doesn't count.

Haha. True, and if anyone thinks that this is a successful strategy for MeeGo, I have a bridge to sell you.

So you're saying you don't think there will be a MeeGo device after Harmattan. Maybe.

While I understand the potential of Qt, I just think that Nokia would have been able to better execute on maturing both Symbian and Harmattan / MeeGo if they weren't encumbered by Qt.

It was too late after Elop made his announcement. Elop had killed every product they had out. Symbian is effectively dead. QT for their moble phones is effectively dead, considering that it is unlikely that QT will make any sort of progress with WM.

While he talks about "disruptive" products, they are mostly going to start from near zero because of this decision, with nothing to really market for at least a year. I'd be amazed if Nokia was able to develop anything internally OS-wise that would be of any signifigance to their industry.

It is really starting to look like everybodys cashing out and cutting their losses. Figures that they hired Elop to tear nokia in to pieces from the inside. They've already given up on internal os development. Soon all that's left are hardware manufacturing for ms and the mapping services. As a Finn it's sad to see a company that was once our pride and joy - the inventor of cellphones themselfs - be reduced from market leader to oem manufacturer :'(

There are two complicated issues here. First of all, Nokia, Microsoft, Google, Apple and the other "players" are all quite different companies, with different capabilites, and not identical strategies of goals... In the "war of ecosystems", the ecosystems will turn out to be quite different from one another. And the number one difference will probably be on the second new buzzword, "fragmentation"... How much it happens, and how it happens.

Qt by itself does not really define an "ecosystem". It's a library. How much general/multi-platform your application will be depends on much more than just using Qt. This is not the answer to the following question:

Yeah, _this_ is the point... It's actually worse, there are apps for N8 out there that are not immediately available for its siblings C7 E7 C6-01. But I don't know if they were made with Qt or not, and if that was done on purpose or not.

I live in Brazil. I often hear about an app and go to the store page to check it out, and get a message saying it's not available for my region... WTF?!?!?! It's not about ecosystem Qt whatever, they do for other reasons. There are not just technical problems to be dealt with here.




"Qt is part of MeeGo, MeeGo is behind and therefore Qt is behind" This is pretty much a fallacy. Qt is there, ready, it's awesome. You can download the SDK there and play with it to see.

Now, why the Linux device(s) Nokia is working on since 2010 were considered "not ready", I don't know. There are lots of things unrelated to Qt going on. Qt is not the whole OS.


Well, in order to archive multi-platformness we generally end up with some very cool technologies. That includes HTML, and scripting languages such as JavaScript. This is where multi-plataformization is really heading at. Java and Qt and e.g. WxWindows do it in another very different way...

WRT and QML are awesome, and so is HTML5, and (hell might freeze now with me saying this) Flash! This is all great, and supporting multiple platforms is part of their raison d'être. Now, it is true that if you only think about that, obsessively, you will get nowhere. But this is true for any obsession.

Qt is cool now because it's great to work in that SDK. The fact the API has been implemented in many platforms is currently second to that IMO.

...But it's quite important to Nokia considering they do have multiple platforms to care about, unlike i.e. Apple. Now all of this is irrelevant if they can't get people to code for any single of their devices.

Coding for Symbian was hell, and even using Maemo's first SDK was not cool (I prefer cross-compiling very much, thanks). This comes before any concern with device fragmentation.


I would love to take a peek at that white board. And I am still very curious to know how WP7's (WP7.5?) whiteboard looks like.

I insist. Qt is not "the one to blame". It's the number one right thing Nokia has done in the past couple of years. I don't think they would be in a better position now not having done this, and keeping wiht the GTK stuff like you said... I prefer to have a delayed device with all the software enhancements we know they developed in the last year.

I think the laborious changes are not in porting Qt to Harmattan, but in the UX... We will only know when it gets released.

No way. First of all, Qt _is already_ in Symbian, both Symbian^3 and older. And Maemo too. There is no reason to suspect adopting Qt was a too laborious work with no return... Specially because Qt brings the innovation that was very much needed for Nokia developers, specially Symbian developers, because working with the old Symbian tools simply blows. Continuing on that direction would be suicide, they had to do _something_. Qt was the something, and it's a very good something.

Now, it is certainly not the only factor to determine if consumers and developers will be attracted to the "ecosystemz", and if the business will be profitable (Nokia is said to have been selling a lot, but profiting too little...)

Aah, this is the problem... More below.

You can't blame technology, you blame people.. but I digress.

I see this all the time in the tech industry but I think Nokia did it wrong. I think the question that needs to be asked, is, "who is Nokia selling to?" I would contend that Nokia was selling to developers and not customers.

Hindsight is 20/20 but let's look at the original iPhone, no SDK and about as closed as you can get, but it was a sexy phone. Over time they figured out how to get developers on board and boy did they get on that money train. It didn't matter how hard / easy it was to program for the iPhone if they were going to make money developers jumped on and being the smart guys they are, they figured it out.

Nokia on the other hand took the open approach. I love open systems but it just feels like they were catering to developers which means they weren't focusing on ecosystem, and by that I mean they weren't focusing on making Symbian / Maemo / MeeGo sexy, easy to use.

They thought, if we make a system that everyone loves to work on then we'll get tons of developers and when then the customers will follow. The sad fact is that they needed to make sexy phones (which is what they were good at but stopped doing). I've never seen easy to program for as a real selling point for any product.

I'm no developer but look at the PS3. From what I hear it's a horrendous platform to program for, yet people happily endured creating games on that platform, why? Because they can make money on it and customers were willing to spend their money.

No, it wasn't Qt's fault, it was the fault of those that felt they had to have the perfect technology at the expense of making a compelling product.

I know I'm talking to a bunch of developers but that's just my $0.02.

So where are we now? One of the things I liked about Android was that you can be an Android user, lose your phone, buy a new one and by logging on to your Google account most of your content / apps gets loaded. Cool cloud stuff. One of the things I hated about the iPhone was that you always had to be connected to a computer to get it all setup. I think all of that goes away with iCloud.

They're trying to build something that makes customers happy and make an ecosystem that's easy to use. Where's Nokia with that? They were still dorking around with the operating systems and libraries, they had no time to focus on improving the customer experience. It's a shame because the customers are the ones that spend the real money, not the developers. Yeah, but once they finally release a MeeGo device, it'll be really easy to develop for. Great, try taking that to the bank.

Yes. That's what I said. Why?

Frankly speaking, Nokia already did that. They disagree. And developers disagree.

Actually, until recently it was pretty well known that every cross-platform title was better on the XBox 360 than it was on the PS3. The reason why is that most companies were writing for the 360 as the first priority.

Sony has been playing catchup for 5 years and only recently has caught up (that is, before the PSN troubles...)

Yes, and we all know how that worked out.