My first steps in software and app development happened back then (we’re talking 2011 here) during my days as a student on the Symbian platform – simply because I used devices with this platform myself naming the Nokia N97 and Nokia 808 PureView. When Microsoft acquired Nokia’s smartphone division and discontinued the system, I developed my own store, AppList, as a centralized way to continue publishing and updating apps for all these devices.
This store had a web interface as well as a native client that was able to check the list of installed apps for updates and even had a homescreen widget to inform about updates – something that was never particularly well documented on Symbian. Considering I was only 18 years old at the time and all my knowledge around Qt/Symbian C++ and PHP was based on self-taught knowledge, I’m quite proud of that – sometimes I also miss the fact on Android and iOS that there is no longer this niche mainstream platform that Symbian or Windows Phone were back then.
Be that as it may, with the start of 2025, it’s time for me to put the past to rest and focus more on the future. As both my Nokia 701 and my Nokia 808 have unfortunately given up the ghost, I have now decided to take AppList offline with immediate effect.
In the course of this, I would also like to briefly record a few statistics: A total of 214 apps have been published, which have been downloaded over 1.7 million times by all users, which I think is a proud figure for a platform that was virtually dead at the time of the store’s release.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who used the store and helped me with the development. As part of this, I would also like to open source the code of the actual client on GitHub. If anyone is still programming something for Symbian in 2025 for whatever reason – have fun: AppList code on GitHub.
