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J2ME phones were doing incredibly well outside the US from what I remember seeing - they're part of the reason Japan was seen as being so technologically advanc

by Groxx 5y ago

J2ME phones were doing incredibly well outside the US from what I remember seeing - they're part of the reason Japan was seen as being so technologically advanced in the consumer realms. And Android also runs Java. It being a full Java rather than the weird inconsistent nonsense that was J2ME is heavily due to significant compute improvements - in that sense, Android was merely ahead of the curve, and made some good architectural choices to make it perform well. So yeah, I think the powerful personal phone revolution was inevitable. They might not look like iphones, but they would absolutely look better than Windows CE before they hit a billion users. Plus, really. Look at Palm OS. Look at iPhones. There's not a huge UX conceptual leap there - it's much more in the premium hardware, and later in the unified app store, proving that the market for mid-high-price good devices existed (more expensive WinCE devices already had a small but consistent market. Pro/consumer-grade was inevitable). And I think there's room to argue that we'd be better off without the app store monopolies that resulted, so that could go either way (though I fully grant the massively superior user experience at the time).

geokon 5y ago
Was the shift to full Java that important? I'm still baffled it wasn't a bigger deal. But the reality is that no one slapped on a new skin and recompiled their desktop java application and then ran in on Android Even all these years later it's still basically impossible to make a Java application that runs on mobile and desktop (it's technically possible with Gluon but I've never seen it in the wild). At best the shift allowed you to reuse libraries .. which is not a small win, but seems like a fraction of whats possible I'm not deep in the Java mines so maybe I've missed some big picture issues around convergence - and why it wasn't even attempted. Would be curious to hear from the gurus :)
- Groxx 5y ago
  I don't know many of the dev details of J2ME personally, but I have encountered many blog posts and whatnot about how inconsistent development for it was. There were many runtimes, many different sets of available libraries, and many many unique bugs to work around - Java's "write once, run anywhere" at its absolute worst, basically. So "full" Java brought both a significant wave of standardization, and gained access to an utterly HUGE set of libraries, tools, and developers that were mostly unavailable before. So language-wise it's a somewhat small improvement as you are probably expecting. Android could have been another J2ME, and everything probably would've worked the same. But it greatly lowered the barriers to entry, which is basically a requirement for a large and active app ecosystem.
  - geokon 5y ago
    Thanks for the insight. Yeah, I can see how all these slightly off JVMs can really sour things. Esp. with regards to tooling and development ease. There was a whole era of these not-quite-JVM like things. Like JavaCard also comes to mind (I think it's still what runs on SIM cards). I think it's understandable given how under-powered the devices were - but the end was sort of inevitable

by Groxx 5y ago

geokon 5y ago

Was the shift to full Java that important? I'm still baffled it wasn't a bigger deal. But the reality is that no one slapped on a new skin and recompiled their desktop java application and then ran in on Android Even all these years later it's still basically impossible to make a Java application that runs on mobile and desktop (it's technically possible with Gluon but I've never seen it in the wild). At best the shift allowed you to reuse libraries .. which is not a small win, but seems like a fraction of whats possible I'm not deep in the Java mines so maybe I've missed some big picture issues around convergence - and why it wasn't even attempted. Would be curious to hear from the gurus :)

Groxx 5y ago
I don't know many of the dev details of J2ME personally, but I have encountered many blog posts and whatnot about how inconsistent development for it was. There were many runtimes, many different sets of available libraries, and many many unique bugs to work around - Java's "write once, run anywhere" at its absolute worst, basically. So "full" Java brought both a significant wave of standardization, and gained access to an utterly HUGE set of libraries, tools, and developers that were mostly unavailable before. So language-wise it's a somewhat small improvement as you are probably expecting. Android could have been another J2ME, and everything probably would've worked the same. But it greatly lowered the barriers to entry, which is basically a requirement for a large and active app ecosystem.
- geokon 5y ago
  Thanks for the insight. Yeah, I can see how all these slightly off JVMs can really sour things. Esp. with regards to tooling and development ease. There was a whole era of these not-quite-JVM like things. Like JavaCard also comes to mind (I think it's still what runs on SIM cards). I think it's understandable given how under-powered the devices were - but the end was sort of inevitable