Though Symbian Foundation Executive Director Lee Williams publicly deemed Google's approach to spreading Android the "perfect storm of fragmentation," yesterday the Foundation launched the beta of its developer program for what looks to be a pretty fragmented app store architecture in its own right.

Here's how it works: The program is called Symbian Horizon, and in this program, developers have their applications approved through the Symbian Signed identification process. This process adds one of four kinds of "tamper-proof digital certificates" to an app, one of which involves the app's stamp of approval from one of three independent testing facilities. Each of these facilities charges the developer a different amount, and each runs a different test.

Once this is done, the app is then listed in the Symbian Horizon Directory, which gets published to various app stores. Currently, there are five app stores: the Ovi Store by Nokia, the Samsung Applications Store, AT&T's Media Mall, Sony Ericsson's PlayNow Arena, and China Mobile's Mobile Market. Within most of these stores, users have to specify their device to access the content catalog: the Ovi store has six device profiles, for example, and PlayNow Arena has nearly 70.

"We recognize that developers face many challenges in bringing their products to market on Symbian devices," Williams said in a statement Tuesday. "In particular, the diversity of application stores in our ecosystem increases the burden on developers by requiring multiple submission and review processes. But this diversity can also offer an advantage over competitors' closed systems, where applications sometimes receive arbitrary or commercially motivated rejections. Symbian Horizon retains this advantage while reducing the burden by becoming a conduit to multiple stores, helping developers reach the largest global mobile market in the world more efficiently."

Under the terms of the program, it is now free for developers to list their apps in the Symbian Horizon Directory, and the goal is to provide developers with access to the largest Symbian market with the lowest possible cost of entry.

According to the Symbian blog, "Approximate figures we've worked on suggest we can reduce the cost of publishing apps by about 75% compared to not using Horizon, assuming you want to push your work to six stores...Over the long term however, running Horizon will not be cheap, so the Foundation will open-source the development of the business model."