The Symbian Platform Release Plan
David Wood, Symbian's Eexecutive VP for Research has recently presented a high level overview of The Symbian Foundation's Release Schedule Plan, starting with Symbian^2 which is essentially Symbian OS v.9.5 integrated with S60 5th Edition with with Feature Pack 1 for Touch UI ...
>> Introducing the Release Plan
David Wood
The Symbian Foundation Blog
March 12, 2009
blog.symbian.org
There’s a lot of activity underway, throughout the software development teams for all the different packages that make up the Symbian Platform.
These packages are finding their way into platform releases. The plan is that there will be two platform releases each year. Here’s a high-level picture of what’s expected over the next year or so:
Symbian^2, which is based on S60 5.1, reaches a functionally complete state at the middle of this year, and should be hardened [debugged] by the end of the year. This means that the first devices based on Symbian^2 could be reaching the market any time around the end of this year - depending on the integration plans, the level of customisation, and the design choices made by manufacturers. Symbian^3 follows on six months later - reaching a functionally complete state at the end of this year, and should be hardened by the middle of 2010.
In the picture, the yellow arrow roughly indicates the time period in which the code for a platform release is available. The milestones in a platform release are overseen by the Release Council on behalf of the community:
• Prior to functionally complete, the platform grows as new features are added by contributors
• Between functionally complete and hardened the development community focuses on driving up stability of the platform by testing and contributing defect fixes
• After being hardened the release enters a more stable phase. Contributed defect fixes will continue to be incorporated by package owners for around 12 months, but prime focus will be on later releases.
Progress towards both milestones will be governed by contributions from the community. The intent is to “timebox” each release by fixing the functionally complete date and including only features that deliver in time at a reasonable stability level. This is the same principle that has worked so well with integrated releases of Symbian OS in recent years.
For a fuller picture of the lifecycle of a platform release, take a look at this:
As you can see, the diamonds representing the “functionally complete” milestones are paced out six months apart - though it’s open to the Release Council to alter the timing. There will typically be 5 platforms under engineering development at any one time:
• One release - Symbian^N say (abbreviated to “S^N”) will be in the hardening phase
• Two previous releases will be in the stable phase
• The next release (S^ N+1) will be in feature submission phase
• The one after that (S^ N+2) will be in early builds.
There will also be roadmap plans for releases happening even later.
The feature set for Symbian^2 is already virtually frozen. Most of the content for Symbian^3 is already agreed, but there’s scope for contributors to make a difference. The content for releases from Symbian^4 onwards is much more open for debate. ###
>> Incremental Platform Development
David Wood
The Symbian Foundation Blog
March 14, 2009
blog.symbian.org
Just as the entire Symbian platform progresses incrementally, in six-month release steps (with each step delivering significant new functionality and improved performance), each individual platform release itself follows a path of gradual development:
• No increase in the release feature set takes place after the “functionality complete” milestone
• In the 24 months before that date, the number of package features tagged as targeting this release gradually increases over time (shown in blue in the digram)
• In the 12 months before that same date, the number of features that have been delivered to managed codelines for this release also increases (shown in yellow in the diagram)
• Some packages may have potentially large or disruptive features that are stable and available on managed codelines well in advance of functionally complete; these package versions are incorporated into early builds
• The majority of the features are not delivered to managed codelines (and hence to the release) until the previous release has reached functionally complete
• In the six weeks or so before “functionality complete”, only non-disruptive features can be accepted into the managed codelines for the release.
You may wonder how the whole process is managed: who makes the decision about what is in, and what is omitted?
Each package owner has considerable autonomy in this regard. They have been chosen as highly skilled, capable, thoughtful, forceful software leaders.
For larger or more contentious decisions, the Symbian Foundation has a system of councils, made up of selected member companies:
• The Feature and Roadmap Council invites proposals for contributions from the community and seeks to coordinate new contributions into a unified platform roadmap
• The User Interface Council invites and reviews descriptions of new user interface elements and develops guidelines to help ensure high quality device user experiences
• The Architecture Council invites and reviews technical solutions for new contributions in order to ensure the architectural integrity, backward compatibility and fitness-for-purpose of enhancements to the platform
• The Release Council coordinates the integration of contributions into stable and timely platform and tools releases.
The councils interact with the platform releases as follows:
• The FRC creates and maintains the platform release roadmap, and defines themes and critical features for each platform release
• The UIC supports contributors regarding UI and UX
• The AC supports contributors re architectural issues and compatibility of public API
• The RC provides oversight to platform release projects
In most cases, we are hopeful that councils will be able to reach consensus decisions. On occasion, votes will be necessary. This raises the question: who gets to vote?
Although all members of the foundation will be able to track the discussions and proposals for council meetings - and will be welcome to provide opinions - in the end, it is a smaller number of member companies who have a voting responsibility. These companies are selected by the Board, out of the set of companies that indicate their interest in a council seat.
Decisions on the makeup of the councils for the next 12 months are expected to be taken in a Board meeting mid April. Companies with a strong interest in participation should step forward soon!
Prospective council participants must be signed members of the foundation. The criteria to be considered by the Board include the following:
• Which council(s) the member in question is being proposed for, and the rationale for the choice of council(s)
• Details of any contributions made or intended to be made to the community by the member (these may include code, resources, participation in working groups, co-marketing activities, and so on)
• Details of the application, service or device shipments represented by the member’s offerings, including the portion of those currently and potentially based on the Symbian Foundation Platform
• The names and biographical details of the proposed primary and deputy representatives
• Details of any particular expertise held by the member relevant to work undertaken by the council. ###
>> Symbian Accelerates Open Roadmap to Reverse Falling Share
Caroline Gabriel
Rethink Wireless
16/03/2009
rethink-wireless.com
The Symbian Foundation, which will manage the operating system's transition to open source, has announced an aggressive roadmap - just in time, it seems, since the OS is losing ground in the nascent smartphone market.
Symbian has been dominant in the smartphone OS market, and for 2008, retained market share of over 52% (by units sold to end users) according to Gartner figures. But this was down 6% on the year before, in a total market up 14% to almost 140,000 units (according to the Gartner definition of 'smartphone'). And in the fourth quarter, Symbian's share slid below the 50% mark, down 21.6% year-on-year to 47.1%.
This is not a surprising turn of events - Symbian was bound to lose the dominance it acquired when it was virtually the only smartphone OS apart from Windows Mobile, as the market matured and new challengers arose, with Apple entering the sector, RIM moving to 3G and Linux shifting up the food chain with high end implementations like Android and LiMO. The big winners in 2008 were Mac OS X, up 245.7% to 8.2% market share as the 3G iPhone took hold; and RIM, up 96.7% to 16.6% share, overtaking Windows for the number two slot.
Perhaps worryingly for Symbian, which is pinning its plans to increase its lead again on open source, the open source platforms were losing ground in 2008, against the closed single-platform offerings like iPhone, BlackBerry and PalmOS (up 42% to gain 1.8% share in 2008, ironically enough, considering the launch of Palm Pre marks its deathknell and the Pre will run a Linux variant, WebOS). Apart from Symbian, the only other smartphone OS to lose share was Mobile Linux, down 4.2% to just over 8% share - however, the fourth quarter saw a leap of 19% on the same period in 2007, to 8.4%, presumably on the back of the Android G1 launch and, to a lesser extent, LiMO activities.
So Symbian is fighting back, with a clear eye on the midyear launches of a host of Android phones, the Palm Pre, and new iPhone and BlackBerry models. It has accelerated its release program for its open source software and for the Series 60 developer platform inherited from Nokia. The ambitious plan will see up to give different Symbian releases under development at any one time, with the first release - called Symbian^2 - to be "functionally complete" by mid-2009 and "hardened" by the end of this year. At this point, Symbian^3 will be appearing in its initial version. Symbian^2 will be based on Series 60 release 5.1 and will be followed by updates about every six months.
The Foundation says all of the big five phonemakers are committed to models based on the software, though apart from Nokia, the individual vendors have not released any details on timescales or product profiles. It is likely that a wave of Symbian^2 products will start to hit the market in the first half of 2010, with some early movers, especially from Nokia itself, appearing in time for the 2009 holiday buying season.
"The intent is to 'timebox' each release by fixing the functionally complete data and including only features that deliver in time at a reasonable stability level," wrote David Wood, Symbian's executive VP for research. "This is the same principle that has worked so well with integrated release of Symbian OS in recent years." He said it will be up to manufacturers whether users of current Symbian-based handsets will be able to upgrade to the open version. Although the program may sound complicated for developers to track, it will allow vendors to react quickly to changes in market demands, and include new functionality in an agile way, says Symbian. ###
>> Symbian Sets Aggressive Release Plan
Nancy Gohring
IDG News Service
March 16, 2009
pcworld.com
The Symbian Foundation plans to release a new version of the operating system every six months, with the first expected to appear in phones at the end of this year.
Last week the foundation, formed after Nokia bought out the remainder of Symbian last year and vowed to make the software open source, revealed its release plan for the software. The schedule is so aggressive that going forward, the group will typically be working on five versions at the same time.
The first release, with the difficult-to-pronounce-name Symbian^2, will be complete by the end of the year and will be based on S60 5.1, the user interface developed by Nokia. That means that phones using the operating system could go on sale this year, depending on choices that manufacturers make, said David Wood, executive vice president of research for Symbian, in a blog post.
The next release, Symbian^3, should appear in phones by the middle of 2010, he said.
Features that will appear in Symbian^2 are set and most of the features for Symbian^3 are agreed on, but some changes could still happen. The content of Symbian^4 "is much more open for debate," Wood said.
When asked in the comments after the blog post how users should pronounce the new name, Wood said: "The simplest way to pronounce 'Symbian^2' is 'Symbian two'. But I'm sure people will also say things like 'Symbian to the power of two' and 'Symbian mark two' and 'Symbian spring two'."
If the foundation can stick to the time schedule, it will be releasing new software much more frequently than competitors. By comparison, Microsoft unveiled Windows Mobile 6 in February 2007 and just this year announced a partial update to version 6.5. Apple has been a bit more frequent in its iPhone software updates. It introduced iPhone 2.0 software in July 2008, a year after unveiling the initial version of the phone, and the company is expected to announce the third version of the software on Tuesday.
The frequent-release schedule could allow Symbian to stay on the cutting edge of mobile developments. That could help it regain some of the momentum that it has lost in the past year or so. Researchers at Gartner recently said that Symbian's market share plummeted by 21.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the fourth quarter of 2007. In the fourth quarter last year, Symbian had 47.1 percent market share. Research In Motion came in second place with 19.5 percent, according to Gartner, so Symbian still has a solid lead despite the loss.
"This is not a surprising turn of events - Symbian was bound to lose the dominance it acquired when it was virtually the only smartphone OS apart from Windows Mobile, as the market matured and new challengers arose," wrote Caroline Gabriel, an analyst at Rethink Research, in a note about Symbian's announced OS release schedule.
The aggressive plan shows that Symbian is aware of the competitive landscape."So Symbian is fighting back, with a clear eye on the midyear launches of a host of Android phones, the Palm Pre, and new iPhone and BlackBerry models," Gabriel wrote. ###
- Eric - |
