Protesting Piracy : Saving Symbian

Symbian-Developers community is all about truly dedicated developers and the users supporting them. Here we try our best to make the developers feel safe and confident, as well as we try to make users love their Symbian devices. We understand how much work a developer do while cooking apps/games, designing themes and creating mods. As of now, the SD community has many high quality theme designers, application developers game makers and modders, who waste their precious time and money to make users feel happy and things easy. We were never against free content and information sharing.

We are also Symbian users, actually I haven’t used any other brand else Nokia, and can understand what a user demands for. But if you were reading Know Your Developer series on our blog, then must be knowing how much hard-work the developers do before launching an app to Nokia Store. They write thousands of lines of codes, make the code useable for our devices and with a lot expectations, they submit the content to store. After a battle with Nokia store Quality Assurance (QA) Process, one day the content finally gets published on Store. Apps cost $0.00 to $4.00 at average. The developer thinks that the user will support him and will donate some money to him to keep him working. But, it is very shameful that the app/theme/game gets retailed for free on the same day. Just imagine the pathetic situation of the developer, who gets not even a single review on store while the mean, the warez(the name we give to those content thieves), gets a lot of, “+1! Thanks for the share.”, “I love this site. Keep sharing.”, ” You’re doing great.” type comments. No one even mentions the original developer. And is there anyone fool, who will buy an app if it is downloadable somewhere for free? Now the situation becomes like this, 2 reviews on Nokia Store.. 80,000 downloads via N****b.com. Now, you guys tell me, “Will the developer create another app? Will he update the existing app?”

Not only this, they reach the height of shamelessness and say that Symbian is dying and we are supporting it. Are they really doing so?

All top level game and app developers have abandoned their projects for symbian, only because of those warez sites. Quickoffice hasn’t update its app since 2011 for Nokia Belle and 2009 for S60V5, I asked them the reason and what they told was truly embarrassing. They weren’t getting as much money from Symbian platform, thus they stopped working on it. Picsel had a plan to launch SmartOffice 2.0 for Belle this year but they stopped that project too. Similar situation is of Gameloft. They aren’t publishing any more HD games and have no plan to return back to Symbian except some Java games. Similar situations have been encountered by other top level developers like EA Games, 10tons LTD, Lonely Cat Games, SPB, PiZero etc more or less. I think you got the reason. The reason is piracy. Developing apps/games/themes for Symbian is not that easy as compared to other platforms, still they gave the best of apps and games to us. But after 2011, Piracy broke their moral. I can name some sites who have pirated all games and apps from them to an external site.

Many people say that Nokia ditched Symbian therefore it is dying. Is that true? What are we doing then? A user purchases a brand new Nokia Belle device for hundreds for dollars. But he is not even capable to spent a single more dollar to buy that amazing Asphalt 6 HD game. (Height of misery) He downloads it via some third party website of warez. After a few hours of gaming he finds that it was an amazing game and he thanks to the site which gave him the game. Why? Why is there no love for actual developer?

All top level developer companies left Symbian and moved towards Android or iOS. Nokia was supporting Symbian a few months before, now they’re promoting nothing but WindowsPhone.

THEN?

Who cares about Symbian then? Those warez? I am sorry if I am rude, dear ‘FanClubs’ and more… If you really want to support Symbian in its last days, then please make an app for it to enhance it better. Believe me, if you can make apps/themes, We can let you share all premium contents from our developer- members. If you really did that, I promise, you would understand how bad it feels when someone shares your app without your permission and without giving any profit to you.

Well..assume for a minute that those warez sites are doing it all for the good of Symbian users. Then there arises a question. Why they put plenty of advertisements at their sidebars? Why don’t they host the files at their own? Answer is simple. They get money for linking to external file hosting services and also get a lot of money from the advertisements. To be honest, they are making money, even from free apps. They are parasites leeching money from others hardworks. If they really care about people, they should use their own host and remove the spamming advertisement banners from the sidebars [and the texts.]

And… If you [pirates] think that Symbian is dying and who cares about it now. Then, you are wrong. We care about it. We are now totally determined towards the mission to save the digital rights of our friend devs, atleast.

Here, I declare a straightforward strategy of Symbian Developers community. We will take down all those sites who will host or publish any paid content from our group of developers. If you can’t buy an app, then don’t use that. This is the user’s motto of this protest . If you don’t know who are in our group of developers and are protected using DMCA then please have a look there at our about page.

NOTE: The example app was inspired by famous but ignored Ultra Shell. That powerfull app still has only two reviews. Note that those 80k downloads were via a single warez site.
PS: Another post is being written with full guidance on how to use DMCA and DRM against pirate sites. Stay tuned.

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