Jan is currently at the sort of the crossroads with the development of the Gravity app, as it comes to porting it to QT. His problem, and the problem many of the current Symbian developers face? Whether to further develop for Symbian or switch to Android or iOS. The reason is QT – a new development environment for Symbian, which he has to learn from scratch. And the learning curve is not that much different from learning to develop for Android. So Nokia/Symbian has to convince Jan and many other independent developers, that they will be better off staying, rather then moving to Android.
The good news is that Nokia still has some time, and now, with Symbian^3 and new devices, also the means to do so. S^3 is still backwards compatible with Symbian^1, and most applications for the older version of OS will work with new Symbian after only some minor tweaks. So Jan is in no hurry to port Gravity to QT just yet, and says that he has some time to make the decision while Nokia ships those 50 million Symbian^3 devices. The early signs are very encouraging – according to him – the conversion rates for Gravity on Nokia N8 are higher then on any other Nokia phone before.
Gravity's creator under the microscope
Published by Steve Litchfield at
No, not that gravity. Gravity the much-praised social network client for Symbian. Here's an excellent 17 minute video interview (and written summary) with its creator, Jan Ole Suhr, taken at Nokia World 2010. Did you, for example, know that Gravity was originally intended to be a little freebie giveaway to attract visitors to Jan's other commercial products? The interview also answers whether Jan is worried about Nokia's new native Social application or about a future forced rewrite in Qt.