We have only briefly spoken about Nokia Here Maps and HERE services and that was upon the announcement and release of Nokia’s first line of Android powered smartphones the Nokia X family of devices. While some were already familiar with HERE maps and the services and experience it provides compared to other similar applications, plenty of people have never had the chance nor the pleasure to try out HERE maps just for the simple fact that they have never owned or operated a Symbian based device, myself included. That may soon change. It appears that a couple of job listings have been discovered on LinkedIn that point to Nokia looking for people with the experience to develop mobile apps, and experience developing for Android and iOS specifically.
While this is purely speculation at the moment, there’s no harm in pondering the possibility that we could soon be able to open up the Play Store and navigate(pun intended)to HERE maps and install it. Nokia is apparently looking for a software engineer and a mobile developer, so they’re definitely looking for people that have the know how in building for Android. The software engineer job requires the individual to have some experience with getting at least one or two apps out the App Store or Play Store. Looking at the job listing you’ll notice that the very first job responsibility on the list states that the engineer will design and build advanced location-based services applications for the Android and iOS platforms, so while they don’t come right out and say that HERE maps is coming to Android, this makes things pretty clear. The second job listing has the individual working directly with mobile app developers and carrying the project from start to finish, doing things like product management, building, testing, and delivering mobile products, and will have to deliver across the entire app life cycle.
Since Here services wasn’t acquired by Microsoft in the acquisition, Nokia is free to do what they wish with the location service and it appears that they’re interested in getting to the service into as many hands as possible, which seems to include Android and iOS sometime in the future. While Google maps is already a dominant force in this area on Android, having other choices isn’t a bad thing.