To start, I’ll put this question into context:
Is it viable for an individual programmer. Possibly a small team for an artist, but think mostly a very small non-corporate team making commercial apps. I’m mostly asking this question as a mobile apps programmer who would be interested in deploying his apps to multiple platforms.
I understand that Symbian is effectively dead (that is, on the way to dying).
I have a good amount knowledge regarding C++ and the Qt APIs for desktop OS’s… I’d also therefore be wondering if programming Qt for MeeGo has a significant learning curve (is this Symbian C++ all over again?).
Any tips of advice I could get regarding application distribution on MeeGo devices, number of distributed devices, etc. would be much appreciated.
Symbian is dead because the companies that made it popular have abandoned it.
Meego never had any companies make it popular. Intel is still sort-of backing it, and eventually it is theoretically possible that it might one day end up being actively used in the market. But the thing about Intel is that they don’t make a lot of phones. Or tablets. Or anything else where Meego might actually be relevant. And the companies that do make phones have so far shown next to no interest in using Meego. Nokia flirted with Meego for some years, but that was in their most schizophrenic period, when they experimented with a new technology stack every 2 months.
But right now? You’d be moving from a dying product to one that was never alive in the first place.