Symbian Signed and Piracy
There’s an interesting post on AllAboutSymbian on how Symbian Signed could be used to combat piracy. I wrote something along these lines last February. However, Ewan takes things one step further…
"…how about extending the self-signing program to instigate a clear and simple minimal ‘Symbian Signed’ level for authors that identifies them as the actual author (and requiring from them the usual multiple proofs of address and other credentials), but offers no guarantees to the functionality." and…
"phones are ‘locked down’ to certificate installs only"
All this sounds great and I would welcome these changes as there are now too many sites carrying cracked Symbian software. However, I suspect this is too great a change for Symbian and its licensees. Also, it doesn’t solve the problem of Network Operators actually wanting phones that have "guarantees to the functionality". When I spoke to the Symbian Signed people at the Smartphone show, I was told that the current scheme, give or take a few small changes, "is here to stay".
I agree with Ewan that…
"There are costs involved in both admin of the program, and testing, and while the idea of allowing competition to drive down prices from a capitalistic viewpoint has worked, it’s still very high when you consider the number of version/builds a programmer can go through for localisation, bug fixes and improvements."
The financial costs are actually a small part of the equation. The more significant part is the extra red tape, uncertainty (as to what capabilities are required), complexity and hence effort required to bring a product to market. These are the areas I think Symbian can realistically improve on. The current situation is putting developers off and is one of the reasons why there are fewer native Symbian 9.x applications than there possibly should be, considering the SDKs have been publicly available for about a year.
However, if you are a potential Symbian developer you could view this as an advantage. With fewer applications, those who do take the effort to create applications have a receptive market - provided they also put some time into copy protection!