Top Rated FREE Symbian Applications. Symbian. History[edit] Logo of Symbian OS until the Symbian Foundation was formed in 2008 With no major competition in the smartphone OS then (Palm OS and Windows Mobile were comparatively small players), Symbian reached as high as 67% of the global smartphone market share in 2006.[26] Despite its sizable market share then, Symbian was at various stages difficult to develop for: First (at around early-to-mid-2000's) due to the complexity of then the only native programming languages OPL and Symbian C++ and of the OS itself; then the obstinate developer bureaucracy, along with high prices of various IDEs and SDKs, which were prohibitive for independent or very small developers; and then the subsequent fragmentation, which was in part caused by infighting among and within manufacturers, each of which also had their own IDEs and SDKs.
Nokia became the major contributor to Symbian's code, since it then possessed the development resources for both the Symbian OS core and the user interface. Symbian Foundation.