Symbian Signed Applications
Wireless Developer Forum 2006 presentations have recently been posted on the Symbian Wiki. The Symbian Signed presentation shows some statistics for numbers of applications that have been Symbian signed. There have been 14000 SIS files signed since up to December 2006. 3700 of these were content rather than applications. The 30 companies that are self-certifiers (e.g. IBM, Avaya, Seven, DataViz, Good, Visto) have signed 9000 apps.
Ignoring the self-certified apps for a moment, this means that there should be about 1300 signed apps in the market - which there aren’t - there are a few hundred at most. I think this means that companies are either signing lots of apps for their own purposes (not for resale) and/or already signed apps are being re-signed several times.
I also wonder why the self-signers have signed so many applications which have also not made their way to market. To get these numbers, I suspect there’s some kind of dynamic signing going on where application code is modified and signed on a per-device basis (locked to IMEI?).
