Obtaining certificates for Symbian applications and digitally signing them costs hundreds of dollars and these costs are chaotic, so independent developers don't have practically any chance, this resulting in the fact that there is barely any cheap or free software available. Now, however, it looks like Symbian Foundation, who are working on the unified and free platform, offers a completely free development and distribution solution, which is even better than Apple's 99 dollar solution and it even provides publishing in the online catalogs of multiple manufacturers and service providers.
Symbian Horizon is a new, free service which takes over testing, digital signature and distribution costs from developers who have used the free developer tools to create Symbian applications and meanwhile the programmers can keep the full profit they manage to obtain. The aim of the free program is to have good and high-quality software shipped to users, while the owners of these applications are freed from the burden of distributing the software. Symbian Horizon, based on the model of book publishing houses, will later offer translation of applications to all kinds of languages as an extra service, these being published in Nokia Ovi Store, Samsung Application Store, AT&T Media Mall and at least four other online catalogs.
Participants of the non-profit Symbian Horizon program can publish any number of applications, but only ideas and softwares of an appropriate quality will be accepted, so just like in the case of book publishers, Symbian Foundation wants to care only about high-quality solutions, may that be a free software or one that costs some money. While the developer participates in the program, any application made by him remains in his ownership, so he can do anything he wants with it and can even cancel it at any time. Additional details about the Symbian Horizon program, currently accepting a limited number of - mostly Symbian ^1 - applications are available at this website. The program is expected to be launched full-scale in October.
