Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian
- Reference: 1752737233
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/07/17/symbian_forgotten_foss_phone_os/
- Source link:
Smartphones are everywhere. They are entirely commoditized now. Most of them run Android, which uses the Linux kernel. The rest run Apple's iOS, which uses the same XNU kernel as macOS. As we've said before, they're not Unix-like, [1]they really are Unix™ .
There have been a bunch of others. BlackBerry tried hard with BB10, but even a decade ago, [2]it was over . It was based on QNX and Qt, and both of those are doing fine. We [3]reported last year that QNX 8 is free to use again. Palm's WebOS [4]ended up with HP and now runs in [5]LG smart TVs – but it's Linux underneath.
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The most radical, though, was probably Symbian. The Register covered it at length back in the day, notably the epic [7]Psion: the Last Computer feature, followed by the two-part [8]Symbian, The Secret History , and [9]Symbian UI Wars features.
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Built from scratch in the late 1990s in the then-relatively new C++, it evolved into a real-time microkernel OS for handhelds, with the radical [12]EKA2 microkernel designed by [13]Dennis May and documented in detail in the book [14]Symbian OS Internals . There's also [15]The Symbian OS Architecture Sourcebook [PDF]. An [16]official version of the source code is on GitHub, and [17]other copies are out there.
We liked [18]this description from [19]CHERI Project boffin [20]David Chisnall :
The original Symbian kernel was nothing special, but EKA2 (which is the one described in the amazing Symbian Internals book) was a thing of beauty. It had a realtime nano-kernel (does not allocate memory) that could run both an RTOS and a richer application stack. It was a victim of poor timing: the big advantage was the ability to run both the apps and the phone stack on the same core, but it came along as Arm cores became cheap enough that just sticking two in the SoC was cheap enough.
Before Nokia was assimilated and digested by Microsoft, it [21]open sourced the OS , and despite some [22]licensing concerns , it's still there.
It strikes this vulture as odd that while work continues on some ground-up FOSS OS projects in C++, such as the [23]Genode OS , or [24]Serenity OS , which we [25]looked at in 2022 ,the more complete Symbian, which shipped on millions of devices and for a while had a thriving third-party application market, languishes ignored.
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(Incidentally, the Serenity OS project lead has moved on to the independent [27]Ladybird browser , which we [28]looked at in 2023 . Work on the OS continues, now community-led.)
[29]Google's Android boss suggests ChromeOS could be on borrowed time
[30]GParted: Still the best free partitioner standing – unless you're on a 32-bit box
[31]The price of software freedom is eternal politics
[32]Red Hat sweetens the RHEL deal for biz devs – just don't put it in prod
Symbian's progenitor, Psion EPOC32, predates much of the standardization of C++ – much as BeOS did. We've seen comments that it was not easy to program, but tools such as [33]P.I.P.S. made it easier. Nokia [34]wasted vast effort on multiple incompatible UIs, which have been blamed for [35]tearing Symbian apart , but none of that matters now: adapt some existing FOSS stuff, and forget backwards compatibility. Relatively few of the apps were FOSS, and who needs touchscreen phone apps on a Raspberry Pi anyway? Qt would be ideal – it's a native C++ tool too.
Fans of all manner of 20th century proprietary OSes from AmigaOS to OS/2 bemoan that these never went open source. Some of BeOS made it into [36]PalmOS Cobalt but that sank. Palm even [37]mulled basing an Arm version of PalmOS on Symbian , but [38]the deal fell through .
Some of those OSes have been rebuilt from scratch, including [39]AmigaOS as AROS and [40]BeOS as Haiku . But they run on Intel. Neither runs natively on Arm, and yet Symbian sits there ignored. Sometimes you can't even give the good stuff away. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2015/10/02/bb10_five_reasons_why_it_failed/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/11/qnx_8_freeware/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2011/02/13/hp_webos/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/lg_tv_critical_bugs/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aHjJt4sJymEIiDBgnz5S6wAAAgQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/06/26/psion_special/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/11/23/symbian_history_part_one_dark_star/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/11/29/symbian_history_part_two_ui_wars
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aHjJt4sJymEIiDBgnz5S6wAAAgQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aHjJt4sJymEIiDBgnz5S6wAAAgQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKA2
[13] https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennismayeka2/
[14] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5826970W/Symbian_OS_internals
[15] https://eketab.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/thesymbianosarchitecturesourcebook.pdf
[16] https://github.com/SymbianSource
[17] https://sourceforge.net/projects/symbiandump/files/
[18] https://lobste.rs/s/k0gcxw/psion_symbian#c_qvfq3z
[19] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/CHERI/
[20] https://cheri-alliance.org/events/speakers/david-chisnall/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2010/02/04/symbian_open_source/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/06/nokia_confirms_symbian_not_open/
[23] https://genode.org/about/index
[24] https://serenityos.org/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/31/serenityos/
[26] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aHjJt4sJymEIiDBgnz5S6wAAAgQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[27] https://ladybird.org/
[28] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/17/serenity_os_turns_five/
[29] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/android_replacing_chromeos/
[30] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/14/gparted_live_1708/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software_freedom/
[32] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/10/rhel_business_developers/
[33] https://docs.huihoo.com/symbian/s60-5th-edition-cpp-developers-library-v2.1/GUID-35228542-8C95-4849-A73F-2B4F082F0C44/sdk/doc_source/guide/P.I.P.S.-subsystem-guide/PIPS/WhatIsPIPS/Overview.html
[34] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/03/10/nokia_ui_saga/
[35] https://www.theregister.com/2004/02/24/ui_wars_tore_symbian_apart/
[36] https://www.theregister.com/2004/09/29/palmsource_cobalt/
[37] https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/08/palm_mulled_linux_for_nextgen/
[38] https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/14/palm_cto_rubbishes_3000_man/
[39] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/aros_live/
[40] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/09/testing_haiku_beta_5/
[41] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The Burning Platform
Even in the face of iOS and Android devices, Symbian was still doing well although on many Nokia devices you'd be hard pushed to tell they were actually a smartphone. But in the long term, Symbian was written for tiny underpowered systems and newer smartphones were beasts running Unix.
What killed the platform was Stephen Elop's "Burning Platform" memo, which led to what was *meant* to be a gradual shift from Symbian to Windows. Customers dropped Symbian almost overnight because nobody likes a dead-end platform, sales dropped to a fraction of what they were and a bunch of quite interesting Nokia touchscreens got canned as a result. Symbian's swansong was the remarkable Nokia 808 PureView. The 808 and other late-model Symbian devices run Nokia Belle which was really quite nice. It's a shame really because the platform did still have a lot of life in it.
Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out..
Re: The Burning Platform
I wonder if MBA courses have a foot-shooting module. It would be a nice case study to go along with Ratnerisation.
I always found the little psions very impressive. I still don't think anyone has matched the usability of those little keyboards since
Well, there was that brief attempt at a revival by [1]Planet Computers but it really didn't stick. I actually bought one and rather liked it, but outside of being a handy thing to take into cramped comms rooms and behind difficult server racks when one needed something that supported a USB-C serial adapter it was too big to be a phone and too small to be a laptop so it never got as much use as I had hoped. I also bought it just before covid meant that we were suddenly all working from home, and the need for something I could keep in my pocket and use on the train suddenly went away.
A nice little device, but like so many nice little devices from small start-up companies, the company clearly floundered and support sputtered out before it could be polished up beyond "interesting prototype" sort of status. A couple of years iteration on the software and a rev2 of the hardware with better battery life and it would have been great. Sadly I imagine the demand was never really there.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/27/cosmo_communicator_hands_on
> A couple of years iteration on the software and a rev2 of the hardware with better battery life and it would have been great.
Are you not aware that there were 2 more iterations of the product line?
Gen 1: Gemini. I own one. You are largely right in what you say.
Gen 2: Cosmo. External screen.
Gen 3: Astroslide. Switched from clamshell to chunky slider.
I did, I bought the cosmo - which is the one I linked to and little external screen aside it has all the same problems as the gemini. Also a bunch of new ones, because the little external screen is terrible it's way too small to be useful for much beyond notifications - which is probably just as well because the lag on touch inputs is so bad as to make it unusable. The big problem was the software - which they just didn't put enough effort into keeping up to date. Maybe that's mean - maybe they did the best they could with the resources they had, but that brings me to the Astro.
The Astoslide Struck me as a rather different device, and probably the one that killed the company. They sort of still exist, but I've never seen them have any phones in stock and there haven't been any new firmware releases for four years, and the last one we got still contains some pretty show stopping bugs.
All the development time that went into that thing should have been spent on making the software on the Gemini and Cosmo devices actually work properly. It left those of us who bought them feeling very much like we did when Microsoft brought out WinPho7. We got all excited about it, we liked the new hardware, and then suddenly got rug-pulled when they announced that WinPho8 would be incompatible and our existing devices would be abandoned as all development went into the new platform.
I bought the Cosmo...
I loved the keyboard, I loved the landscape aspect, but the rest SUCKED.
Iffy battery life.
Bodgy OS customisation to handle keyboard + default landscape aspect.
Android updates, including security ones, few and far between.
A dubious third party OTA mechanism.
They promised Sailfish and Linux support, never delivered on Sailfish as far as I understand it, and screwed over the open source developer who was working on the linux distro (which kinda cheated by using Android Linux Kernel with Debian).
The external display was slow and painful, leveraging one of the IO ports out of the SoC and running on a separate microprocessor...
... so turning off the external display was the best way to extended battery life, but
... this would disable NFC
... this would disable the right hand USB C port
... the right hand USB port was slower
UIQ
Let's not forget the wonderful UIQ based phones, like the Sony Ericsson P800 / P900 etc.... Absolutely loved mine. A bit of a monster, but had email, web, and everything else that you'd need
Symbian vs S60
Symbian was the OS.
S60 was the UI layer.?
Politics caused Nokia to scrap S80 and use S60. Motorola used some different UI. Later S60 based UI was inferior to 2002 S80 on the Communicator.
Also there was the Java issue. Unlike later Google, mobile makers used the crippled mobile Java for apps, because the full Java was only licensed to desktops.
Re: Symbian vs S60
> S60 was the UI layer.?
*One of the* UI layers, along with Series 80, Series 90, UIQ, MOAP, and OPP.
Re: Symbian vs S60
Good reminder. I had the Communicator “Brick” but in no time new apps and functions were S60 only. Fine product end-of-lifed far too soon.
Maybe Symbian itself was good...
... and the Nokia hardware was great for the time, but Nokia phones as a user experience (mine was with N70 and N95 last) was horrendous.
Apps would crash, the phone would reboot, it was sluggish, trying to get apps that would work on your specific model of handset was a pain..
If there's a gold nugget underneath the turd, I hope someone finds it, but overall, it just felt half baked and before its time.
Ah, Symbian
One of the last Symbian devices I owned was a Nokia 5230. For 2009 it was pretty advanced looking back especially for its size.
Touchscreen with handwriting support via a stylus and even had a built in satnav application, although you were far better off downloading the maps first via PC.
Definitely better to use and longer battery life than the HTC running early Android that I replaced it with a few years later.