Development Investment differences between iPhone and Symbian

Question

Which one is cheaper: to develope on top of Symbian or on top of iPhone? Both direct $-figures and time-to-market figures are warmly welcome.

Answer 1

It is way cheaper to develop for iPhone, than Symbian.

The development tools for iPhone are way more competent, with a everything you need from a very accurate simulator, visual debugging, and very nice profiling tools. Symbian simple do not stand a chance when it comes to tool support.

Also when it comes to the frameworks and programming language Symbian stands in the shadow. Symbian have a quite convoluted C++ variant, that takes quite some time to learn, and even more time to master.

On the iPhone you have Objective-C that is quite different from pretty much everything, but still much easier to learn than the Symbian C++ variant. The Symbian frameworks feels very dated compared to to the Cocoa Touch frameworks on the iPhone. Anything that requires two or three lines of code on iPhone, can easily become 30 lines or more with the Symbian frameworks. The more modern GTK API:s is better, but still maybe 15 lines of code, so no match yet.

The Cocoa Frameworks also gives you allot for free, anything from cut and paste to implicit animations for all common tasks. All this will require explicit extra code on Symbian.

In short, you will be able to write an iPhone application with:

• Much less code = less bugs.
• In a fraction of the time.
• With more features.

Answer 2

It depends what you want to do and what you already have.

If you already have a MAC desktop or laptop computer and an iPhone with its monthly contract, then, yes, developing for the iPhone is very cheap.

If, like the majority of people, you already have one computer running windows but no smartphone yet, then the initial cost of developing for Symbian will be much lower because the tools are free and most Symbian phones are less expensive than the iPhone.

It is still currently easier to make money (to offset cost) out of an iPhone application than a Symbian application but the Apple store doesn't quite seem an income stream you can plan to rely on if you are a complete beginner.

Keep in mind that way more people use fairly recent Symbian phones than iPhones worlwide and the distribution channels available to Symbian phones are coming right now.

Most people looking into Symbian development get very afraid very fast because they only see native Symbian OS C++ and how hard it can be.

The major advantage of Symbian is that you can pretty much choose the runtime you like: Python, J2ME, QT, .NET, Ruby... They all have different strengths and weaknesses, different costs, different times-to-market.

EDIT: Justine Pratt at Creative Algorithms wrote an article comparing platform development cost. It's not necessarily highly scientifical or all-inclusive but it does contain good information.

Answer 3

It's probably also worth noting here that the Symbian developer experience is in the middle of a massive overhaul. If you want to start developing native apps on Symbian, then learning Symbian C++ now would be a little crazy. Qt is the new application framework for future Symbian devices (and can be installed to current ones). IMO, Qt is an even nicer framework than Cocoa.

Regarding whether the investment will pay off, the jury is still out. It's fair to say that MOST iPhone developers don't make money - the store is too crowded and the number of junk apps is incredibly high. Symbian app stores like Nokia's Ovi are too new to have meaningful stats, but so far it seems average selling prices are a bit higher. In the medium term, the addressable market for Symbian devices through app stores is going to be much higher, as iPhone is ultra-high-end only, but those consumers are also the ones with most cash to burn on junky apps. So if you want to write gimmicky novelty apps then iPhone is probably best. If you've got a genuinely useful service to deliver, I expect you'll make more money on Symbian.