When doing feasibility studies for companies, sometimes things can’t be done without the Symbian (or Nokia) partner APIs. This is a make or break thing for the smaller companies who can’t commit tens of thousands of Pounds or Euros to partner with Symbian and (or) Nokia to use the more capable partner APIs.

The theory used to be that APIs were restricted so that the majority of developers were dissuaded from using interfaces that were likely to be different across phones or future OS versions. It was also a method of hiding access to sensitive APIs.

However, Nokia has been listening and things have been changing. Nokia recently introduced a S60 API Partnering process through which any developer can apply for access to the APIs needed to implement given functionality. Nokia has also been quietly making more APIs public. The APIs have been released with the warning that they may not work on all current or future phones. Sensitive APIs should now be covered by platform security.

This raises the question whether Symbian could similarly expose some more APIs. While such APIs also wouldn’t have any guarantees as to source or binary compatibility, they should be more compatible over time than the Nokia APIs, because they need to remain stable for use by multiple licensees.

Looking at the current additional Nokia S60 APIs, it makes me question how many of these should really be in the Symbian OS as opposed to s60 code base… but this is an altogether different issue.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 8:19 am and is filed under Symbian, Series 60, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.