Talking with Lucian Tomuta about benefits and features of Nokia Smart Installer

Lucian Tomuta, from Nokia, has recently shared a really interesting video showing the Nokia Smart Installer 1.0 in action, illustrating how app dependencies can be dynamically deployed at installation time.

Nokia Devs asked Lucian some more information about Smart Installer.

ND: What is Smart Installer, and which benefits does it bring to developers?

The Nokia Smart Installer for Symbian (Smart Installer in short) is an open source tool developed by Nokia (big thanks to Kimmo K., Maheswari G. and Jukka J. for pulling this through) and contributed under EPL to the Symbian Foundation. Its purpose is to allow a rather smart deployment of application dependencies (like the Qt libraries) to devices which don’t yet have it. The inspiration was – of course – the apt-get tool used in Debian-based Linux distributions, such as Maemo.

When packaging their application with the Smart Installer, developers don’t have to worry anymore about whether the receiving device will have all the needed libraries, in the right version, for the application to work as designed. At install time, the Smart Installer will scan the phone for existing components, checking if any additional install/upgrade is needed and if so, perform the needed downloads and installations. Once this operation is completed, if all the conditions are met for the application to run, the packaged application is then installed, and the user can successfully launch it. More information about the Smart Installer solution from a developer perspective can be found at http://tinyurl.com/SmartInstaller

ND: Are you planning to add improvements or new supported libraries in the near future

The Smart Installer solution can be used to deploy any sis package, without any particular effort on developers’ side. We are currently enabling the deployment of Qt, Qt Mobility and Open C but in the future we might extend the set of supported components.

The benefit for the end user is that the size of the application packages to be downloaded is kept to a minimum. Instead of always downloading large application packages, containing libraries which are already on the phone and therefore discarded at install time, the Smart Installer packaged apps will only bring the minimum payload, and any shared library is only downloaded and installed once, minimising the data costs.

If a software package is small enough to be embedded in the application which needs it, I would probably prefer as a developer to use the embedded SIS approach. This is why many other libraries offered through Forum Nokia, such as VoIP Audio Service (VAS) for example, are not currently considered as suitable candidates for Smart Installer based deployment.

ND: Which are the channels to get support and send feedback about Smart Installer?

As mentioned previously, the Smart Installer is a open source component contributed to the Symbian Foundation. For any defects identified in the Smart Installer’s implementation, developers can create bug reports in Symbian Foundation’s bug tracking system. Improvement suggestions are also welcomed there.

The Nokia Smart Installer for Symbian solution, including the servers network which delivers the Smart Installer supported packages, is however on Nokia’s responsibility – so for any problems regarding this solution as a whole, any technical questions regarding the use of the Smart Installer tool for developing applications targeted at Nokia devices or for any related Ovi Store support issues, developers are of course welcome to Forum Nokia’s Discussion Boards.

Have you already played with the Smart Installer? What’s your opinion about it?