— LORDBANKS

Be advised, this is an exceptionally long rant.

We’ve heard everything about Symbian dying, burning platforms, diving marketshare, shrinking apps ecosystem, the apocalype. I don’t imagine that I’ll be bringing anything particularly new to the already tired Symbian fail meme, but this Symbian fan post on the Mobility blog seemed to need an answer, and I found myself writing a riposte which, as it turns out, is too long to be appropriate for the comments section. First I need to acknowledge that the writer of this post was merely telling us why he would continue to be a symbian adherent to the very last. His reasons are personal of course. But in that post, he made some assertions which I believe need to be put into the correct perspective. Not to be corrected, mind you, like footie fans a lot of us feel strongly about our preferred smartphone/OS platforms, and no one’s opinion is necessarily superior to the other. It’s simply a matter of individual context and perspective which should never be foisted on others. That said, there are certain facts of life which are independent of anybody’s context. One of them is the fact that Symbian, in whatever form it decides to morph into, is a terminal case. But I’ll get to that matter later, first let me address the major premise of the Mobility post.

It Is Up To You To Customise Your Experience?

The post’s author likens a smartphone to a high-powered automobile whose true potential can only be maximised by an experienced driver who can push it to its performance limits. In the case of smartphones, he believes this can only be accomplished via the use of third party applications. First I think this analogy is hardly apt because driving a car below the limits of its performance specs is different from needing to mod it with performance accessories. The average motorist never has to retrofit their vehicle with with turbo chargers or nitro-boosters. Not doing these has absolutely no effect on the vehicle’s ability to deliver on it’s fundamental purpose, which is to be driven with the reasonable level of ease that is to be expected of a new car. Third party apps are definitely important, they greatly extend a device’s capabilities. But their absence should not handicap a device to the point where cosmetic user interface adjustments become absolutely necessary. Why a mobile phone should need third party apps to achieve basic UX objectives, like accessible homescreen functions or intuitive menus is beyond me. Second, leaving it up to me to customise my user experience is just a bad idea. And I’ll explain why.

Mobile Geeks Are Like Formula One Drivers…An Underwhelming Minority

Unlike Formula One drivers and other car performance nuts, normal people generally don’t enjoy spending lots of time under the hood of their cars, messing around with its innards. They just want to drive. And this is where most mobile geeks miss the point. We want to jump into our phone’s software, install apps with nerdy names like ‘DzSoft SettingBar”, tweak the phone’s settings until it responds to our every moustache twitch, use the latest NFC technology to bump vcards into our co-worker’s phones, mod our devices into neighbourhood ISPs, triangulate our kid’s every visit to the toilet with GPS…all of which is perfectly fine. What is weird is that we erroneously assume that every other person can and should subscribe to these geeky inclinations too. When in actual fact, people’s needs are deceptively simple. They don’t want their devices to pack the latest, greatest, space age gizmos. They just want to interact with their world in the simplest and quickest ways possible. Most people just want to call, text, take pictures and surf the web without having to dive under their phone’s hood every five minutes.

If It Doesn’t Work Right Out Of The Box, It’s Broken

If I understand the Mobility post’s author, he would sell us the philosophy that the quality of the user experience is dependent on the user’s willingness to customise it. This opinion, from business point of view, is hardly sustainable, people are just too busy (or lazy) for that.  The notion that people will pay for a device that’s supposed to get work done, only first they have to work on it is very mistaken, in my humble opinion. Like Formula One drivers, the number of advanced mobile device users who have the time and savvy necessary to create a custom experience are comparatively few, there are certainly not enough of them to matter to a device manufacturer’s bottom line. This is mostly Apple’s fault, but current consumer thinking is more along the lines of if it doesn’t work right out of the box, it’s broken. Yes, they’ll install a few apps, but how many of them do people actually use? Only the bare necessities, usually in furtherance of interaction (social networking, messaging, payments…), NOT user experience objectives, like a taskbar, volume rocker or homescreen manager.

The Prognosis – Symbian Has AIDS

The fact that Symbian’s UX woes are mitigated as you move up the Symbian price ladder to the Anna and Belle echelons will not prevent it’s inevitable demise. Quote me on this people, if Symbian’s 2000 and late UX is HIV, then Symbian has AIDS – Apps Incentive Deficiency Syndrome. Its UX issues made existing users balk…and leave. The dwindling userbase then led to a severe attrition of it’s developer community and consequent neglect by popular services. At this point in time, developers and services will typically develop their apps first for iOS. Then for Android. Then Blackberry. And lastly if at all, for Symbian. In fact lately the devs don’t even bother anymore, they just make a java version and bundle Symbian users with feature and dumbphone users. As a result, using Symbian means that by default you do not have access to most of the latest, greatest apps. Which then restarts the cycle, more users dumping the platform for greener app pastures. Now before you cry blue murder, check out this list of services that support everybody but Symbian.

1. Most news services have  iOS, Android and Blackberry apps.
2. Popular blogging service, Posterous, supports iOS and Android.
3. Social media dashboards, Hootsuite, Ubersocial and Seesmic are available on iOS, Android, Blackberry and WindowsPhone 7
4. Amazon’s Kindle app is available on iOS, Android, Blackberry and WindowsPhone 7
5. Cloud Based Productivity Apps like Dropbox and Evernote
6. Social networking site native support. Facebook has native Android and iOS apps, while Twitter supports iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and WindowsPhone 7

Nope, no sign of Symbian anywhere here. Apparently all these developers and services now think that developing for Symbian is not worth their while. And who can blame them?

The Punchline

Three things I’d like to end with:

1. It’s okay to pander to the geek community, but considering that their total number is a mere fraction of the normal people demographic, making phones as if they are developer prototypes flies in the face of simple business sense. Most normal people do not have the time or savvy to dive under their device’s hood to toggle uncountable settings, talkless of deploying third party mods. Remember that they are lazy and that for them if it doesn’t work right out of the box, it’s broken.
2. People now care less about hardware specs, performance or resource efficiency, utilitarian concepts that just don’t cut it anymore, especially when you consider the ever decreasing costs of manufacturing high powered hardware and bandwidth costs vis a vis the increasing reliance on web and cloud based applications. Computing is now all about the user experience, ease of use and device empathy. Yes, in a world where attention spans are getting shorter, some people wouldn’t mind if their devices could anticipate their next move (can someone say Siri?). People already have enough work to do without you saddling them with the unavoidable responsibility of creating their own custom mobile experiences. Again Apple is the likely culprit responsible for this daunting UX standard –  If my grandmother can’t use it, it’s useless.
3. A viable mobile platform is one that is to a large extent self sufficient, without external performance  props. Third party apps exist, not primarily as bug fixes for UX deficiencies but as a means of extending device functionality. In fact, the most successful mobile apps are the ones that create, capture or give access to experiences, whether it’ s news consumption, capturing and sharing photos with your loved ones, or just playing Angry Birds. Not the ones that offer alternatives to a deficient OS’s feature set. A stable and relatively bug free experience attracts users in droves, which is an irresistible incentive for developers and major service providers to create apps on the platform, thereby contributing to a more robust experience for all the stakeholders involved. To him who has much, even more will be given.

I and the Mobility post’s author agree on something. Third party apps are essential to the full enjoyment of a device’s capabilities. But the popular adoption of a mobile OS platform is a cycle that originates from the initial user experience. In my opinion, initial experience has to be intuitive enough to attract a substantial number of users which in turn creates the incentive for app makers to develop on the platform. When this happens, major services that people use will ignore the platform at their peril and will take it upon themselves to support its users by pushing proprietary apps. In its hey-day, Symbian enjoyed this sort of patronage from Opera, via Symbian specific versions of Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, which is why many of us were able to put with the crappy pre-Anna default browser. But as is illustrated by the apps list above, they hardly have it anywhere else. Now Nokia can only hope that embracing the WindowsPhone platform as the future of their mobile business will put them back in the good graces of the developers, service providers and ultimately, the end users.

Ironically, there isn’t much point to this argument, considering that Symbian’s exit is a done deal. Like Nokia, we might as well give it a rest. Symbian will be fondly remembered, but the lessons from its tragic flaws must be learnt and turned to the advantage by surviving players in the space. The user experience is everything. One that is easy to use, unobtrusive, gets outs of the way when work needs to be done, and enjoys robust integration support from the other inhabitants of the ecosystem. The indices for determining if these vague criteria have been met vary largely with individual preferences, but all geeky arguments are moot in the face of where the people choose to put their money. And just how much of this money is Symbian getting? Your guess is as good as mine.

[photos: flickr/Andrea, flickr/Jason Thorgalsen and flickr/Josh Liba]