The Symbian Foundation released the source code of the popular Symbian mobile OS to the community yesterday, as the OS continues to lose marketshare to rival software offerings.
Symbian remains the No. 1 smartphone platform in the world, despite stiff competition from the iPhone, RIM BlackBerry, Google Android, and other software platforms. Current industry analysts indicate there are more than 330 million Symbian smartphones around the world.
"It's increasingly important for smartphone platforms to offer developers something unique. The placing into open source of the world's most widely-used smartphone platform emphatically fits that bill. It will be exciting to see where this takes the industry," said John Delaney, IDC Analyst, in a statement.
As an open source enthusiast, I like that Symbian has finally decided to go open source -- but I still don't think it's going to matter. Symbian is an aging OS that is simply unable to keep up with the more dynamic offerings from Google, RIM and Apple.
However, the 330 million Symbian users today may see a boost in overall functionality, but it likely isn't a long-term fix for the platform's dwindling popularity. Apple and RIM are able to keep their development in-house while making changes consumers demand, Google keeps the base Android OS open source while heavily contributing to it. I believe Symbian is also attempting to attract app developers back to the OS -- a difficult task as app makers switch to other platforms -- but with the sheer number of Symbian users, it could work.
By the end of 2012, Symbian is still expected to be the number 1 mobile OS in the world, with Android right behind in the number 2 position. Both RIM and Apple aren't expected to go away, and will still have a large userbase as consumers continue the migration to smartphones.
