We all know that while there are a lot of cool developer houses in Asia, Europe and Africa, for whom coding for Nokia, and Symbian more specifically, is on the high priority list, there are still tons of amazing software companies in North America who would rather play the lottery by publishing their titles on iOS and Android amongst fierce competition by hundreds of thousands of other apps, than play The Wheel of Fortune and work on Symbian where getting any fame is almost a guarantee.
So why am I making the statement that if developers don’t come now, I don’t think they ever will? Well because of three factors essentially.
- The first one is the 10 million dollar prizes competition Nokia has launched with AT&T for developers in North America who release their apps on the Ovi Store.
- The second is the Nokia Developer Day that the company held during CTIA, one of the largest conventions in the USA, a few days ago where they explained the process of developing for Symbian using Qt, Web Runtime and Flash, and how to publish on the Ovi Store with almost no fees.
- The third is that they gave away one Nokia N8 to every developer present at the conference, which adds up to all the N8s that they also gave to developers during Nokia World 2010.
So if you’re an American developer and you just learned that it’s relatively easy and lucrative to make apps and games for Symbian during the Developer Day, you were just handed a phone to make sure you can test your apps on the real thing and not an emulator, and you know that if you do a good job, you might end up with oodles of cash in a country-wide competition, but you still can’t be arsed to work on a Symbian app for the Ovi Store, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with Nokia’s perception in the United States and I’m afraid it’s too little too late to fix that.
What do you think? Are these three reasons enough to incite some decent developer work from the USA on Symbian and do you expect lots of cool new apps and games on the Ovi Store in the next few months? Or do you think all is lost in that market?