Symbian, the pioneering smartphone OS built from scratch in C++ with an innovative EKA2 microkernel, was open sourced by Nokia before Microsoft's acquisition but remains largely ignored by the developer community. Despite being a complete, real-time OS that shipped on millions of devices with a thriving app ecosystem, it sits unused on GitHub while developers work on less mature ground-up FOSS projects. The OS featured advanced architecture including a realtime nano-kernel capable of running both applications and phone stack on the same core, but poor timing and Nokia's UI fragmentation contributed to its decline.
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