Nokia Keeps Pumping Meego And Symbian – But What App Developer Will Now Bother?

Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations... → Learn More

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has been on stage tonight at a Mobile World Congress press conference talking about Nokia’s future relationship with Microsoft. Various blogs have been live blogging (here’s a post from Engadget). But sitting back and listening to Elop’s explanation about how Symbian devices will still be shipped and a Meego device, due to ship this year, will be used for experimentation and “disruption”, one has to ask the simple question: Where are the apps?

While the first MeeGo product will ship this year with a Qt framework, Qt is unlikely to go onto Nokia’s Windows Phone, thus killing off all those developers who studied Qt. “If we encourage a fork in Windows Phone’s development platform, we could create a situation where we confuse developers and consumers,” said Elop tonight in Barcelona. Bang goes that talent base, then.

blog comments powered by Disqus