The Symbian App Store -Horizon
Finally Symbian introduced its Application store -Symbian Horizon. With almost all the cell phone OS applications stores out in the market, Symbian too had to make this move and come out with their App store.
Here is what the Symbian team has to say about theitr App store:
“We recognize that developers face many challenges in bringing their products to market on Symbian devices,” admitted Symbian Foundation executive director Lee Williams. “In particular, the diversity of application stores in our ecosystem increases the burden on developers by requiring multiple submission and review processes. But this diversity can also offer an advantage over competitors’ closed systems, where applications sometimes receive arbitrary or commercially motivated rejections. Symbian Horizon retains this advantage while reducing the burden by becoming a conduit to multiple stores, helping developers reach the largest global mobile market in the world more efficiently.”
Well, I got to know about this on a blog; in a random search. Below are few extracts from the blog post with the Symbian news.
“Most cellphone manufacturers had already estimated the potential of a Symbian application store. So, there are application stores already in place like the Nokia Ovi Store, Samsung Application Store and Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow Arena. Also, stores from China Mobile (Mobile Market) and AT&T (MediaMall) offer Symbian apps.The good thing is that all the offerings from Horizon will be integrated in these application stores”.
According to the blog, the Symbian App store will have around 50 applications. The number of applications would go higher in the coming year-2010.Even after 1000 application, Symbian is going to be far behind Apple App store (in terms of the number of applications Apple store offers).Facts from the blog, “Symbian would still be lagging the Apple application store by some 100,000 applications. But the huge market share may really help Symbian to compete with the big Apple.”
For more about the App store and the Symbian competition, please read the original blog post Symbian Introduces Its App Store, Finally!