The Symbian smartphone platform will go back to being essentially an in-house Nokia operation as the Symbian Foundation winds down its governance role next April, Symbian and Nokia executives said today.

"By the beginning of April, [the foundation] will be a licensing organization. Development of the platform will continue to be by Nokia. Developers will access tools and support from Forum Nokia and will publish through Ovi Store, as well as they are welcome to publish through other parties," said Jo Harlow, senior vice president, Smartphones, Nokia.

The foundation's new licensing role will make sure companies other than Nokia get access to Symbian through an "alternative direct and open model," according to Harlow, but it's hard to see any of Nokia's top competitors participating in a platform which Nokia will almost entirely define.

The foundation will lay off its 100 full-time staff and disband its various councils by April, said Tim Holbrow, executive director, Symbian Foundation.

Symbian is still the world's largest smartphone platform, though it has been struggling to maintain market share against the aggressive advance of Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

According to the most recent numbers from research firm IDC, Nokia's worldwide smartphone market share dropped from 38.3% to 32.7% between the third quarters of 2009 and 2010, while Apple's stayed at around 17% and combined numbers for Samsung and HTC went from 7.9% up to 16.1%.

During its heyday, phones from Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Nokia all ran Symbian. Motorola abandoned Symbian in 2009 to go with an all-Android strategy. Sony Ericsson dropped the platform this September. Samsung ended its support for Symbian in October.

Having "fewer OEMs deeply engaged than we envisioned," along with "a seismic change ... in the economy, which has led to a change in focus for some of our funding board members" caused the foundation to rethink its role, Holbrow said.

Nokia won't run Symbian without community involvement, Harlow said.

"We are committed to working with the ecosystem and the developer community to ensure that the input from the community is part of what we're using in the development process," she said.

Nokia will soon start to lay out its vision for the future of Symbian, Harlow said. Until recently, the Symbian Foundation had previewed platform releases for the existing Symbian^3 and the upcoming Symbian^4. In October, Symbian said it was abandoning the Symbian^4 moniker for an incremental series of platform upgrades. Harlow said Symbian is still critical to Nokia's smartphone strategy, slotting in below the company's future MeeGo-powered super phones and above feature phones.

"The specific role of Symbian is to bring our services and solutions to ... the mass market of smartphones," Harlow said.

It hasn't been all bad news for Symbian recently. Last week the European Community announced a project called "Symbeose" to fund further development of the Symbian platform. That project will continue, although "we don't know how that's going to be managed," Harlow said.