Mobile software company Myriad Group joins the Symbian Foundation

The Myriad Group announced today that it is joining the Symbian Foundation. Myriad Group is a big mobile software players, formed this year by the merger of French company Purple Labs with the Swiss Esmertec. The group also owns widely-used mobile Web browser Openwave. Between it’s various subsidiaries, Myriad Group has software embedded on around 2 billion mobile handsets worldwide.

Thanks to it’s broad range of subsidiaries, Myriad has a presence in pretty much all of the big mobile industry sellers. It produces mobile applications, software, browsers and messaging services. Now that is has joined the foundation, Myriad gains access to the Symbian license, and can immediately start tinkering with the source code and participating in marketing campaigns.

The Group is joining other huge internationals, like founding members Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, Samsung and AT&T.

From the release:

Simon Wilkinson, CEO of Myriad: “Symbian OS is one of the most advanced smartphone platforms in the world, and its focus on amazing user experiences makes it a perfect fit with Myriad. As global leaders in developing software for mass market phones, we look forward to bringing our software and expertise to help create a new range of exciting devices.”

What we think?

Technically, the current role of the Symbian Foundation is to the shepherd the OS until it is truly open source - which is slated for some time next year. But I think we can safely assume that Myriad Group will be busily integrating Symbian into all of it’s services as soon as possible.