Symbian-Developers

mk27,
You are in principle right, but the one thing you stressed is not so important I think.

First of all, Symbian was fully abandoned very long ago, meaning that no one really wants to develop any kind of malware on it (including popular nowadays trojans-bankers or ransomware). As a matter of fact, I would say Symbian is one of the most secure mobile OS today, simply because it is not actual

I have to disagree. Symbian being uncommon these days does not make it safe. This is equivalent to not locking your doors, but thinking nobody will walk in because you live in a middle of nowhere. The holes are still there.

I may have perhaps worded my post poorly. Let me correct it.

The world of security research is huge, and there is serious money to be made by security researchers who find these and either report them to the developers or sell them on a gray market. Humans are not perfect and there are always vulnerabilities in everything.

Normally they get patched if the software is supported, but Symbian is not anymore. Normally on a supported OS, someone purchases the vulnerability, uses it and it's burned. It's a one time use thing because using it gets the word out and it gets patched with an update. This does not happen on Symbian, which pretty much lowers the barrier to entry because the value of the vulnerabilities goes down, and one can even find vulnerabilities by googling for free.

Symbian being uncommon these days does not make it safe because if someone wants to exploit your phone, all they need is to know you use the phone and google it's vulnerabilities. All it takes is someone actually having the dedication to go after you.

Secondly, you needn't purchase anything from security researches, because Nokia developers were quite lazy. Symbian^3 PR1.0 and Belle FP2 do not differ a lot on binary level. I discovered that when I was transferring 'underground' patches from pre-Anna to Belle - truly saying, in 90% of cases there was even no need to use the disassembler, direct transfer in hex worked out. And as we know, PR1.0 PDK was officially available to the public. So, all you have to do is find some vulnerability in code, compile this part, effortlessly find it on Belle, and viola

Yeah, I worded my thing wrong by saying they are for sale.
I was not aware Nokia almost never patched vulnerabilities. This is even worse because one can easily find some old studies written as a PDF from 12 years ago by googling.

There is also something someone I know (who is very experienced in this topic) told me about Symbian, and that is they are just modems with screens, buttons and other smartphone features attached, as opposed to an SoC package that has a dedicated modem for dealing with the GSM/3G network. They also told me that carriers have full control over the modems that connect to their networks. In case of Symbian, this means full control over the phones.
I have not verified this "full control over all modems" due to my time constrains but if this is true, this would make Symbian inherently insecure by design as the microphone and camera are directly connected to the modem. (let's not forget in some countries, the government has 100% control over their carriers)

Since the existing forum thread you also posted to is dead, I'll reply here

The first roadblock is having any coding/programming experience at all anywhere. If you have some, then we can move past that. But you have said "This is my first ever development project." so I assume you don't. But let's pretend you do.

Really, your best bet would be to obtain some of the development tools from the n8delight blog, and just trying to write code with it. Of course, these development tools are very outdated and may not work in a modern operating system, so if that is the case, it would be good idea to create a Windows 7 (32-bit) virtual machine and installing the tools in that (I recommend VMware if you are on Windows).

As for documentations, you can find them over at The Web Archive of the Nokia Developer website


Other than that, you could find some open source Symbian apps, examine code and learn.

I personally don't have much experience with Symbian related development as I've been focusing on non-mobile stuff all my dev carrier, so I can't help with specifics sadly. But I hope I pointed you in the right direction.

That's the good part, now I'll explain why this is a lost cause.

This is a lost cause for the simple reason that the hardware is underpowered for today's standards and the web has evolved a lot since the last time the Qt webview engine was updated, so forget about webviews. Technically you could write your own webview engine if you need it, but with underpowered hardware, you probably won't get far.

The operating system is closed source and 10 years out of date, which means, there are without doubt lots of unpatched vulnerabilities discovered and sold by security researchers, and anyone somewhat competent can purchase and make use of them whenever they want. If you have to take one thing away form this post, take this one. An unpatched operating system can never be used a daily driver, it's not secure enough.

Only proceed if you want to put all the effort as a proof of concept.

EDIT: Sorry, I just saw HelpDesk after posting this. I posted my question as a reply on that topic, you can check it out here: http://sdf.allstarsoftware.co.uk/qt-application-development/helpdesk-for-app-developers/msg43466/#msg43466



Hello there. I've had plans on development for Symbian for a while now, but I know nothing. Zero. Let me explain.
So, software is my passion and mostly smartphones. I was an Apple fanboy for four years until I got off technology and on life and got a Nokia 5800 for the sake of trying it. I fell in love with S60 after so many years of super mega hyper ultra closed iOS. So last summer I imagined, in my best dreams, some kind of app suite similar to Ovi, which would bring back a lot of long gone functionality to Symbian. I didn't have any plans on doing it, but now I do. So my plans are to bring back apps alike to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, their FOSS alternatives, to make Symbian (almost) fully usable again.

So I do this because I love technology and Symbian and I would like to bring basic internet functions to this great OS. But. I do this because I love tech and Symbian, I don't actually know much about it.
By this I mean that I have pretty much zero knowledge on apps, clients, APIs and their structure. This is my first ever development project.
And so I need help. I don't really know where to start and what to start my learning with, I have a lot of questions, and I need advice from someone who knows. So instead of bothering everyone in the Telegram group or someone without asking first, I thought it'd be better to start by asking here, if there is anyone that would like to help me. Thank you very much.

P.D.: I'm posting this in the Qt section because there's no general one(and it seems the most appealing method for developing my apps at the moment).

Hi there,

Please read carefully the following points:

1) If your phone is already slow on PR1.0, I would not consider upgrading to Belle. What you can do is to upgrade PR1.0 to Anna. Switching to Belle will make your phone even slower! But, finding Anna firmware may be very uneasy these days...

2) If you want to flash N8, you need Phoenix 2012.04 version (https://app.box.com/s/a6w29u47wdyapq3tgqwq2bkgeg9us0zh). As you have neither a flashbox nor a dongle, you have to download the version which I call "Special package by Seidea". Highly likely it will be detected as a virus/malware, but this is not because there is real malware inside. No, it is because this version (as well as all other free Phoenix versions) was repacked and an activator was included in the EXE package, which is triggered by various antiviruses as a false positive.

3) Don't trust Chrome browser, it scolds that you have downloaded a virus every second time
There was no need to format your computers, of course.

4) If you do not trust Phoenix, you can grab Nokia CareSuite (https://magentacloud.de/s/WJddkZ5WDrm9iow). This EXE file is directly from Nokia, and unlike Phoenix, original Nokia CareSuite does not require the flashbox.

I hope this piece of information helps.

Hello, the file isn't available in the link. Please let me tell what I need maybe you've all the items.

I've a N8-00
Release: PR1.0
Software Version: 011.012
Software Version Date: 2010-09-18
Custom Version: 014.002.C15.01
Product Code: 059C3P1
Type: RM-596
Flash Version: 4.0

I like to use this device but it's so slow. There is no anything even installed but still slow. I thought maybe the software update can make it faster this is why I'm trying to update.

I need that the applications needed to this update, I've no knowledge about Symbian, there is long time went last time I used a Symbian phone.
I see the the firmware uploader application needed and the firmware files. Can you please share it if you've clean version of those files. Whatever I found on internet they were all look dangerous apps even I formatted two computer because couldn't be sure.

Thanks.