Nokia "Suspends" Its Free Developer Program 136
jbernardo writes "Nokia has put in deep freeze its free developer program, the launchpad. Now, in the Developer Programs page, one can only see a pitch for a paid 'Nokia Premium Developer Program,' and below, in the Nokia Developer Pro and Developer Launchpad box, there is a text merely stating that Nokia are not currently accepting new applications for Nokia Developer Launchpad and Nokia Developer Pro programs. With most (if not all) Launchpad memberships already expired, seems like Nokia no longer is interested in the developer community, which once was one of the mainstays of its domination of the smartphone market. Of course, that domination was destroyed by Elop and its 'burning platforms' memo, together with the failed bet on Windows Phone 7, so maybe giving up on developers would also be expectable."
I'm with you. (Score:4, Interesting)
Nokia had developers because they had the dominant platform. Websites looked like garbage at the time one phones, so companies wanted to program for Symbian. With Symbian they could easily make apps which were slightly to somewhat better than garbage. So they did.
Once any other company came in and made better hardware (RIM first) and a better OS/UI toolkit (Apple), it was over for Symbian and Nokia was put in a tough spot.
Re:Nokia never dominated the developer space (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey, here at Slashdot we are not spoiling a good Nokia bashing submission with boring facts.
Riiight.... Would be terrible to have that. We should never bring up that the Symbian Market Place alone had 80k apps. We would certainly never mention that there were plenty of other places to get apps (e.g. the best SSH apps never made it to the market place at all). We should never mention that most of the "Apps" were actually applications as opposed to 90% being frontends for someone's blog [windowsphoneapplist.com] or pictures of food [windowsphone.com] and multi-lingual fart apps [windowsphoneapplist.com]. No, it would never do to suggest that a system like that had a more solid eco-system than Windows has on the mobile even though Windows has been there longer than Symbian.
And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.
Ahh yes; a person who posts for Nokia on Slashdot. A person who has sat there in the middle as his own country's main employer is destroyed to save it's American shareholder's investment in Microsoft. A person who has seen the company he works for ripped off; selling it's soul and still ending up displaced by a cheap Chinese clone maker. A person basically working to fuck his own countrymen by taking as much of their lifeblood as possible away from them and sending it to Redmond. That person is trying to intimidate anonymous posters on Slashdot by threatening to accuse them of having a "hell of a life". You think we will go off and commit suicide or something? Do you have a sense of irony?
Re:Nokia 920 phones distributed at MS Build 2012 (Score:4, Interesting)
So, the phone got released last week, and they are only "close" to having the SDK available?
So, that means for the first 6 months we will only have simple demo apps, and quick "fart" apps until everybody gets up to speed, and the big dev houses get their act together. I honestly don't see the platform inertia lasting that long. People who have phone who can't get the Pandora, and other tangential apps they are used to will drop it for the ones who do. By the time the big apps come, there won't be any users left.