Garter analyst Nick Jones has some harsh words for the Symbian Foundation as the platform struggles to compete with competition from Apple and Android, which are steadily eroding Symbian’s dominant market share.

“I think the Symbian foundation is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and ignoring the Android iceberg ahead,” Jones said in a blog post citing the lukewarm reviews for Symbian^3 and what he sees as the platform’s less-than-compelling user interface when compared to Apple and Android operating systems.

“The situation is now serious enough that any developer who isn’t working on something directly related to a new UI is wasting their time,” Jones said, calling the foundation’s work on the S4 user interface a “bet the platform” project. “I think the Foundation needs a contingency plan in case the planned S4 interface isn’t radical enough or good enough.”

Calling the platform’s decreasing market share an “existential threat,” Jones says the Foundation needs to move fast to address the threat because the rate at which Symbian is losing market share is accelerating.

AdMob says Symbian’s global market share of smartphones on its network was 24 percent in May of this year, down from 33 percent during the same period last year. Android’s market share rose from four percent to 26 percent during that same period and Apple’s market share declined from 50 percent to 40 percent.