S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance: A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers

Chapter 4: Binary Compatibility

All platform products used for the purpose of further development cannot be described as part of a platform unless they can keep the promise of compatibility. In S60 this means that the platform itself needs to fulfil the compatibility requirements as well as the devices and the applications. In the other words, each device must maintain the platform compatibility and each application developer should respect the public API set up for implementation purposes. The APIs introduced in the present version are expected to be available in the same place with the same attributes and service in later versions. This is called platform compatibility. MSW has made a promise to the entire ecosystem to keep the public API set untouched from release 3.0 onwards. Naturally, the same promise is expected from each product program, and thus each product program must pass the binary compatibility verification before the device is shipped. Although this chapter presents the challenges and the ways in which they can be tackled from a S60 platform perspective, many of the things included here can be copied with slight adjustments to any platform product.

In S60, the architecture itself has been designed so that the compatibility challenges are minimized. What does this mean and how is it accomplished in practice? First of all, the platform, including all subsystems, is designed to accommodate a layered architecture and, second, the integration of the platform is done ...