Symbian OS

Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 19 threads.

People raised many different problems with Symbian OS, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 22 complaints

Signing tools barely worked, and now need arcane workarounds to run2025-09-27
Very steep learning curve for developers using the Active Object model2025-07-17
Debugger often stops working after a crash, forcing manual process killing; on-device debugging rarely works2023-12-05
Developers couldn't figure out how to distribute apps through the store2022-11-12
Official UI APIs were so convoluted that developers wrote their own instead2022-10-24
Emulator leaves stray background processes; forgetting to kill them breaks breakpoints or freezes the restarted emulator2022-08-13
Developing apps for Symbian phones was hard and painful, deterring outside developers2022-05-25
UI is convoluted and error-prone, hard to use and poorly documented2021-08-25
Developers find the C++ approach and system APIs very difficult to work with2021-08-13
Developer tooling is so convoluted that even hello world takes minutes and deployment is unreliable2020-06-25
Symbian interface was crappy, and the N95 lacked a touchscreen2020-02-10
Friends found the Symbian phone less intuitive than dumb phones, so they avoided it2020-02-10
Clunky and horrible to work with, frustrating to use2020-02-10
Developers must implement exceptions by hand via macros, making the environment painful to use2019-03-26
Symbian was hard for developers to pick up and work with2016-07-29
Symbian dev tools were a jumble on Windows and insane on Unix/OSX2011-08-20
Browser randomly reorders bookmarks every time the mail client opens2011-06-02
Messaging often failed to work right and the installer was frequently broken2010-11-08
Phone was very slow to respond to interactions2010-11-08
Signing and approval takes weeks, with orders lost and repeated fixes costing money2010-06-23
Installing apps on Symbian requires a mess of menus and disclaimers2010-05-30
Docs bury the useful examples under pages of irrelevant explanation2009-10-19