Symbian Blog

So for people who have been waiting on the official launch of Horizon, Symbian’s apps publishing programme, today is the day. The Symbian Foundation launches Horizon officially this morning at the start of SEE ‘09.

For developers looking to the Symbian family of phones as a commercial market, they can sign up to Horizon and have their apps listed in the Symbian Horizon Directory, processed through Symbian Signed, and published to a growing list of application store partners.

A total of five stores now support Symbian Horizon. Along with the initial stores announced, Ovi Store by Nokia, Samsung Applications Store and AT&T’s MEdia Mall, two new stores are now participating: China Mobile’s Mobile Market, and Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow arena.

Since the initial launch plans were announced in July 2009, Symbian has processed an initial group of 50 applications and is helping these developers sign and submit their products to mobile application stores worldwide.

The goal of Symbian Horizon is to help developers bring their applications to the largest mobile market in the world in a cost effective way.

By cost effective what do we mean?

Approximate figures we’ve worked on suggest we can reduce the cost of publishing apps by about 75% compared to not using Horizon, assuming you want to push your work to 6 stores.

So cost effective it certainly is.

Over the long term however, running Horizon will not be cheap so the Foundation will open-source the development of the business model. As of now you can raise questions, issues and ideas around how to make Horizon self-sustaining @ ideas. symbian.org, our newly launched public ideagora.

Horizon could be the best way for developers to get to market but at its heart lies a truism of Symbian’s new life – it can be as great, useful, dynamic and successful as its community wants it to be. We hope this will be an initiative that brings the community together around a common goal of being not just great at phones but great at getting a growing and diverse community of apps developers to market too.