Symbian operating system and Nokia's S60 based on Symbian are well known for breaking the binary compatibility here and there, changing constants and interfaces between the minor versions, etc. As Mika Raento puts it it "Nokia is completely schizophrenic when it comes to backward compatibility". Some interfaces are maintained with the help of various compatibility layers for a long time, while another interfaces sometimes are dropped or heavily re-engineered even within the same S60 version.
While it is definitely up to Nokia and Symbian when and how to change their interfaces, the big problem for the external developers in that the principles for maintaining or dropping the backwards compatibility are not known.
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