Thread: bad news from nokia today
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attila77 is offline attila77
2010-09-12 , 10:13
Posts: 3,319 | Thanked: 5,610 times | Joined on Aug 2008 @ Finland
#48
Originally Posted by silvermountain View Post
With the N900 running an OS that is openly known to be a dead-end OS (no more devices to be sold with Maemo and Nokia development resources being moved from Maemo to MeeGo) how is that not effecting third-parties interest in developing for the N900?
I agree it is a sad state. I'm just saying that info is widely available for months now.

I'll be the first to admit I know very little about Qt and how well adopted that is by the large, commercial s/w developers. I must admit that I've always considered Qt to be more of a community-developer tool and not something used by the larger houses.
You couldn't be more wrong. This may sound as a marketing pitch, but hey - Qt's root were primarily commercial (just to name a few of the more $$$ oriented vendors using Qt in their commercial products: Autodesk, Google, Skype) and has just recently been pushed into the community arena with GPL licensing. Nokia is betting the farm on Qt software-wise. ALL (I hope I don't have to bold/fontsize this ALL) applications for Nokia phones will be done in Qt. Really, In Symbian^4 and MeeGo, Qt is the only official framework. Plus, to build momentum, you have it out-of-the-box on Symbian^3 and made available to legacy Nokia devices, going back as far as the N95. That's an ecosystem that has literally hundreds of millions of devices just from Nokia, not to mention devices from other vendors. And the N900 is part of that ecosystem, regardless of what a techsupport dude says on a Friday afternoon.

Are you seriously telling me that you expect the Maemo5 platform to receive official and commercial third-party support into 'the distant future'?
What people still don't realize is that there is no Maemo5 platform. There is a Qt platform. Maemo 5 is an OS supported by that platform. A subtle but extremely important difference.

Let me generalize for a moment:
If there are, say, 2 million devices sold running OS X, the userbase is mixed corp/non-corp - but the device and OS is about to be EOL'd it does not matter what 'state an appstore' is in or, for much longer, how many devices were sold.

To sum up my ramblings: Number of sold devices becomes rapidly much less important and does not have the profound impact that you mention when you start looking at the other factors.
No, it doesn't work that way really. It is STILL a very important factor for Ovi apps for example to run on a N95. It has been discontinued centuries ago, the successors had a less than stellar reception, but still, if you submit an app to the Ovi store, you make it work on the N95, period. I would agree with you on an armchair basis, but reality disagrees.

End comment (I know finally right...): One thing I don't know - and depending on the answer it would either support or nullify all my ramblings - is how these 'closed source, commercial grade apps/games' developed for MeeGo can/will run on Maemo5.
That is a very good question - the answer depends primarily on the publisher, whether they WANT to make it available (this in fact has no bearing how much longer Maemo5 is officially supported by Nokia). The actual technical effort is minimal, the API level stuff is almost identical as long as there are Qt updates, with packaging and DRM being the sticking points - and that is far more a policy question which will be decided by publishers on a case by case basis.
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