Development Investment Differences Between iPhone and Symbian
It might also be worth noting that the Symbian developer experience is in the middle of a major overhaul. If you want to start developing native Symbian applications, learning Symbian C ++ is now going to be a little crazy. Qt is a new application platform for future Symbian devices (and can be installed on current ones). IMO, Qt is an even nicer framework than Cocoa.
As to whether the investment will pay off, the jury is still out. It's fair to say that the iPhone MOST developers don't make money - the store is too crowded and the number of unwanted apps is incredibly high. Symbian app stores such as Nokia Ovi are too new to have meaningful statistics, but so far average selling prices are slightly higher. In the medium term, the target market for Symbian devices via app stores will be much higher as the iPhone is ultra-high-end, but these consumers are also the ones with the most money to write on junky apps. Therefore, if you want to write delicate novelty apps, the iPhone is best suited. If you have a really helpful shipping service, I expectthat you will make more money on Symbian.
source to share
It depends on what you want to do and what you already have.
If you already have a MAC desktop or laptop and iPhone with its monthly contract, then yes, iPhone development is very cheap.
If, like most people, you already have one computer running Windows but don't have a smartphone yet, then the initial development cost for Symbian will be much lower because the tools are free and most Symbian phones are cheaper than the iPhone.
It's currently easier to make money (to offset costs) from an iPhone app than a Symbian app, but the Apple store doesn't quite seem like a stream of income that you can count on if you're a complete newbie.
Keep in mind that more people are using fairly recent Symbian phones than iPhone mobile phones, and there are distribution channels available for Symbian phones now.
Most people involved in Symbian development are very scared very quickly because they only see the native Symbian OS C ++ and how difficult it is.
The main advantage of Symbian is that you can pretty much choose the runtime: Python, J2ME, QT, .NET, Ruby ... they all have different strengths and weaknesses, different costs, different time to market.
EDIT: Justine Pratt at Creative Algorithms wrote an article comparing platform development costs. It's not necessarily very scientific or all-encompassing, but it contains good information.
source to share
It is cheaper for iPhone than Symbian.
The iPhone development tools are more competent and everything you need from a very accurate simulator, visual debugging, and very good profiling tools. Symbian just doesn't stand a chance when it comes to tool support.
Also, when it comes to frameworks and programming language, Symbian is in the shadows. Symbian has a rather convoluted variant of C ++ that takes quite a long time to learn and even more time to master.
On the iPhone, you have Objective-C, which is very different from pretty much everything, but still much easier to learn than the Symbian C ++ variant. Symbian frameworks are very dated compared to the Cocoa Touch interfaces on the iPhone. Anything that requires two or three lines of code on an iPhone can easily become 30 lines or more with Symbian frameworks. The more modern GTK: s API is better, but still maybe 15 lines of code, so no match yet.
Cocoa Frames also give you free access to anything from cut and paste to implicit animation for all common tasks. All this will require explicit additional Symbian code.
In short, you should be able to write an iPhone app with:
- Significantly fewer code errors = fewer.
- For a fraction of the time.
- Additional functions.
source to share