Samsung on Friday informed its developers that it will discontinue support for Symbian, effective Dec. 31.

Support for the OS will shut down in stages. First up, the Symbian Lab.dev will close on Oct. 29 at 1am GMT. The Symbian Forum will then shut down on Dec. 30 at 1am, and Samsung will remove Symbian content by Dec. 31, also at 1am.

"We recommend posting any new discussion board queries no later than the 10th of December 2010 to ensure your issue can be addressed prior to the Forum's closure," Samsung wrote on its developer site. "Please take this opportunity to download any required documentation before all content is removed. Registration and certification of Symbian applications for the Samsung Apps store will cease from 08:00am on the 31st of December 2010."

The announcement comes a week after Sony Ericsson confirmed that it too would abandon the Symbian OS. In June, Nokia also ditched Symbian in favor of MeeGo.

Though it is not very popular in the U.S., Symbian still has the largest mobile device OS market share. IDC said in a recent report that Symbian will have 40.1 percent of the market in 2010, with the BlackBerry OS a distant second at 17.9 percent. By 2014, Symbian will likely fall to 32.9 percent as Android gains some ground, but that will still be enough to keep it in first place, ahead of BlackBerry with 17.3 percent, IDC said.

Samsung has a number of Android phones, and announced Friday that it will produce several Windows Phone 7 devices. In December 2009, the company also announced plans for its own Bada smartphone OS.