If you think they were "extremely commonplace", you were living in a mid-2000s tech bubble. At best they were kinda commonplace among a narrow set of people who

If you think they were "extremely commonplace", you were living in a mid-2000s tech bubble. At best they were kinda commonplace among a narrow set of people who gave a shit, knew it was possible, happened to have devices which supported these games, happened to have a revision of the device which wasn't locked down by the carrier, and who had the time and patience to tinker with such unusable junk. If more than 1 percent of Java-capable handsets ever had third party software downloaded onto them post-purchase, I'd eat my hat. I wonder if even 1 percent of iPhones manage to get used without ever having at least one app installed from the App Store.