Nokia World kicked off today in London with a long list of announcements that have some people thinking that the iPhone and Android phone might not have the stage all to themselves. While others are covering the new C6 and C7 models, what interests us rather more are the improvements and changes to the development environment.

Nokia World kicked off today in London with a long list of announcements that have some people thinking that the iPhone and Android phone might not have the stage all to themselves. While others are covering the new C6 and C7 models, what interests us rather more are the improvements and changes to the development environment.

To quote Purmina Kochichar the VP for Forum Nokia,

“We have made it much simpler, removed obstacles and made it more lucrative for people to build apps for our phones. We believe that this will convince more developers to build apps for the millions of people, in more than 190 countries, that are using the Ovi Store on their Nokia devices.”

Specifically any apps that you submit to the Ovi store will not have to be signed. What this means for end user security is another question but it certainly removes a tedious step from the submission process. The store has also had a face lift to get it ready for the new Symbian^3 phones.

Nokia is also planning to raise the revenue shared with developers and to support the online purchase of additional facilities from within apps and operator billing. The royalty to developers will fall from 70% to 60% but it will not longer include the variable operator charges which will now be rolled up into Nokia's 40% which should make developer income slightly higher and more predictable.

The first improvement is to the Qt SDK, making it more compact to write UI code and enabling it to cover the Series 40 Touch and Type phones.

Nokia a have also announced a new version of Nokia Maps.

All of this is very reassuring but it ignores the elephant in the room - MeeGo?

The big problem facing any would-be Nokia developer is to work out which OS to back for the future - Symbian^3, for which there are new phones, or MeeGo, which is Nokia's stated operating system of the future. The increased support for Qt is a good sign, however, and suggests that possibly porting from Symbian63 to MeeGo won't be as difficult as starting over. But basically the lack of any word on MeeGo at what is after all Nokia's developer conference is worrying. At the moment the Nokia World looks very much Symbian^3.

It really is nice that Nokia are back. It is even nicer that they have a spot in their hearts for the developers, who after all made the iPhone and are in the process of making Android - but not to address their real concerns might indicate that there is still something lacking.

Further Reading

Nokia no Android - the developer's dilemma gets worse

Android declared favorite mobile platform

Mobile platforms of the world!

MeeGo OS goes open source

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