Symbian recently started allowing anyone into their developer portal. On the whole, it looks much as one might expect from a brand-new portal: wide but shallow. There are many topics to be discussed, but little material behind each.
That being said, here are some things that I find interesting about Symbian's developer site, in contrast to the way Android has theirs:
- Symbian appears to be offering a single portal for both those who are developing on Symbian and those contributing to Symbian itself (once things move to open source). That has a benefit over Android's split personality, in that people should not have a problem finding one side or the other. However, at least at present, I suspect it may make things a bit confusing for navigation.
- Symbian is going with a message board system, offering many discrete boards in different topical areas, but with all the boards located in one spot with one profile and configuration. This has an advantage over Android's scattered set of Google Groups, though it is difficult to fault Google for wanting to "eat its own dog food".
- Symbian appears to be using a customized version of Bugzilla for issue tracking, with separate trackers for Web site bugs and bugs in Symbian itself. While Bugzilla certainly offers much more structured information than does Google Code's issue tracker, Bugzilla certainly shows its age in terms of usability.
- Symbian not only posts who are members of its various councils, but minutes from their meetings and teleconferences. This is in stark contrast to the shadowy Open Handset Alliance and a total lack of transparency into what is going on.
- Symbian's portal has an integrated wiki, while we in the developer community have had to roll our own, with subsequent fragmentation and lack of visibility.
It will be interesting to watch Symbian's progress over the balance of 2009, and to see whether Google and the Open Handset Alliance elect to put more resources into community development or limit themselves to individual members' efforts, like those from Motorola.
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