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Opera Mini appeared at a strange time. This is back around when Apple had done Webkit just for the Mac (derived from KHTML) and Nokia thought it would be cool o

Opera Mini appeared at a strange time. This is back around when Apple had done Webkit just for the Mac (derived from KHTML) and Nokia thought it would be cool on S60, and it was. WAP/WML was a near total flop, although oddly had a second life on interactive TV in the UK where Sky funded creation of a WML browser in OpenTV to enable faster turnaround of new apps. (OpenTV was neither open nor particularly consistent between devices, and the normal mode of delivering content via satellite was difficult logistically). As someone else mentioned imode was way more popular, at least in Japan. (I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France). NTT went to massive lengths to get Japanese companies up and running on imode, such that by about 2002 huge amounts of ecommerce were being done on it, including B2B. I know of major electronics components vendors doing >70% of their sales (by value) via mobile Internet in Japan by 2005. imode didn't really do well in the 3G transition though, and the increased complexity of the phones led to a lot of bad software on them, which was the opportunity Apple ultimately exploited. The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable, but virtually no one was using it, and so Opera Mini was kind of by itself for a while. The company that does a lot of transport ticketing in the UK had at one point a phenomenal mobile banking prototype (that worked) but was told by the banks they simply weren't ready for it, and the banks didn't think the customers were either, which was actually the truth, and so why they pivoted.

lysace 1y ago
> The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable, but virtually no one was using it, and so Opera Mini was kind of by itself for a while. Compatibility with J2ME was really fragmented and this was the time when there were literally thousands of phone models in the market at the same time, so it took a sizeable effort to ship something that worked well. With Opera Mini we had about 5-6 people (developers+QA) working on J2ME device compatibility continuously. And a really impressive physical device library. I think it had about 2.5k devices in the end. Once you got really popular though, most device manufacturers started including compatibility with your app in their shipping criterias, so then it suddenly got really easy.
- fidotron 1y ago
  By 2005 J2ME fragmentation was nothing like as bad as what Android would become, and remains greatly exaggerated. By that point the 3650 and T610 were getting to be history, and Siemens were on the edge of dropping out. It was one of those things that was very surmountable if the market pull would have been there to overcome it, but there wasn't demand because the phone form factors of the time sucked for apps and games. > With Opera Mini we had about 5-6 people (developers+QA) working on J2ME device compatibility continuously. You realize this is tiny? To cover things like Blackberry and Brew took significantly more effort than that, and this is pre GPU or camera variation being a thing.
  - lysace 1y ago
    I meant throughout the life span of J2ME, not specifically in 2005. We built Opera Mini 1.0 in 8 months with a team starting with about 2-3 people, growing to about 10. > You realize this is tiny? Well, yes - I remember being happy that the big US companies found this to be too much work, leaving the market to some scrappy Scandinavians (Opera was based out of Oslo, Norway; Opera Mini was based out of a satellite office in Linköping, Sweden.) I was particularly confused about why Google didn't build a J2ME browser app, having acquired Reqwireless (Waterloo, Ontario). I believe they had that team build a web-to-wap proxy on google.com instead. Speculation: Perhaps Andy Rubin/Android killed the (to me) obvious Google J2ME browser?
- vel0city 1y ago
  5 to 6 people managed to make an app compatible across 2,500 different devices models at a time when there was practically no hardware standardization, and you say that was a hard thing? I will say though, thank you for your work on it. It was an awesome product back in the day, I was incredibly grateful.
RandallBrown 1y ago
> This is back around when Apple had done Webkit just for the Mac I would be surprised if they didn't build Webkit with the iPhone in mind.
miki123211 1y ago
> As someone else mentioned imode was way more popular, at least in Japan. (I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France). Do you have any info on what the iMode technical stack was like? The information available on the internet (at least in English) is scarce.
- fidotron 1y ago
  Someone somewhere will have a French copy of the tech specs, because Bouygues paid to have the whole lot translated before any work could commence. One oddity of the Japanese setup was NTT essentially ran a cloud, of a huge pile of HP-UX servers with Oracle/JVM etc. somewhere in Yokohama which was running all the backend. When I said NTT went to big efforts to get companies on board this is what I mean: they were incredibly proactive about getting integrations into this happening, to the point of entirely hosting it on site if necessary and essentially doing the work themselves for anyone they thought valuable enough. I don't believe any version outside Japan ever replicated this, and it was the magic ingredient along with persistent data connections. The closest thing the west saw to that in practice was the Sidekick, but that never got the level of third party support. It's fairly widely understood that i-mode used CHTML but I'm unfamiliar with the lower levels of the networking stack. App wise there was Java but not normal J2ME. All I can remember that was unique was their scratchpad memory area (which was just way too big), and billing APIs! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoJa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoJa
kergonath 1y ago
> I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France Was it with Bouygues? IIRC they were basically the only provider to advertise i-mode. Anyway, i-mode might have been a flop, but for a brief moment in time I enjoyed being on the bleeding edge with things like Opera Mini on my Sony Ericsson. Those were the days.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > Was it with Bouygues? It was. For reasons that now escape me I was doing billing integration work for it.
cyberax 1y ago
> The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable On the contrary, J2ME was nearly useless without vendor-specific extensions. And the quality of implementations varied quite a bit.
kalleboo 1y ago
Another example of a really well-done J2ME app was Google Maps. It had GPS and street view support at the same time as iPhone only did tower location and Google wouldn't license them Street View. With a high-end Sony Ericsson feature phone, I could multitask(!) between Opera Mini, a J2ME twitter client, IRC client, train timetable app, Google Maps, etc better than a Symbian S60 smartphone could (and iPhone of course couldn't multitask at all) https://kalleboo.com/linked/se_j2me_multitask.jpg https://kalleboo.com/linked/se_j2me_multitask.jpg
- vel0city 1y ago
  I was there dude, I experienced that same thing. Too many people were unaware of what was available at the time.
- bdavbdav 1y ago
  IIRC the S60 multitasking was pretty decent. Holding the swishy app button seemed to pull up a list of running apps.
skhameneh 1y ago
> WAP/WML was a near total flop Not quite, WAP evolved into WAP 2.0 and WML was replaced with xHTML. For a long period of time WAP 2.0 was the only standard while mobile development evolved. Even as HTML support grew in the mobile space, there was a very solid duration of time where WAP 2.0 was the most supported across the majority of devices and browsers (in the mobile space). And FWIW, I wouldn’t consider WML a flop, because that was the only mobile standard supported on most phones before the iPhone.
Macha 1y ago
O2 in Ireland went relatively big into imode and it actually had decent uptick among local stuff. But then GPRS came about and phones started shipping sort of functional J2ME browsers that could do the "real web" and that was that. Opera Mini also was a big leap up in capabilities compared to the Sony Ericsson built in browse I was using on the k750i. Both in terms of compatibility and also the compressing reverse proxy stuff they did when data was being charged per megabyte.
pjmlp 1y ago
Symbian/J2ME was doing perfectly fine in Europe during 2005, source ex-Nokia over here, 2004 - 2010.

lysace 1y ago

> The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable, but virtually no one was using it, and so Opera Mini was kind of by itself for a while. Compatibility with J2ME was really fragmented and this was the time when there were literally thousands of phone models in the market at the same time, so it took a sizeable effort to ship something that worked well. With Opera Mini we had about 5-6 people (developers+QA) working on J2ME device compatibility continuously. And a really impressive physical device library. I think it had about 2.5k devices in the end. Once you got really popular though, most device manufacturers started including compatibility with your app in their shipping criterias, so then it suddenly got really easy.

fidotron 1y ago
By 2005 J2ME fragmentation was nothing like as bad as what Android would become, and remains greatly exaggerated. By that point the 3650 and T610 were getting to be history, and Siemens were on the edge of dropping out. It was one of those things that was very surmountable if the market pull would have been there to overcome it, but there wasn't demand because the phone form factors of the time sucked for apps and games. > With Opera Mini we had about 5-6 people (developers+QA) working on J2ME device compatibility continuously. You realize this is tiny? To cover things like Blackberry and Brew took significantly more effort than that, and this is pre GPU or camera variation being a thing.
- lysace 1y ago
  I meant throughout the life span of J2ME, not specifically in 2005. We built Opera Mini 1.0 in 8 months with a team starting with about 2-3 people, growing to about 10. > You realize this is tiny? Well, yes - I remember being happy that the big US companies found this to be too much work, leaving the market to some scrappy Scandinavians (Opera was based out of Oslo, Norway; Opera Mini was based out of a satellite office in Linköping, Sweden.) I was particularly confused about why Google didn't build a J2ME browser app, having acquired Reqwireless (Waterloo, Ontario). I believe they had that team build a web-to-wap proxy on google.com instead. Speculation: Perhaps Andy Rubin/Android killed the (to me) obvious Google J2ME browser?
vel0city 1y ago
5 to 6 people managed to make an app compatible across 2,500 different devices models at a time when there was practically no hardware standardization, and you say that was a hard thing? I will say though, thank you for your work on it. It was an awesome product back in the day, I was incredibly grateful.

RandallBrown 1y ago

> This is back around when Apple had done Webkit just for the Mac I would be surprised if they didn't build Webkit with the iPhone in mind.

miki123211 1y ago

> As someone else mentioned imode was way more popular, at least in Japan. (I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France). Do you have any info on what the iMode technical stack was like? The information available on the internet (at least in English) is scarce.

fidotron 1y ago
Someone somewhere will have a French copy of the tech specs, because Bouygues paid to have the whole lot translated before any work could commence. One oddity of the Japanese setup was NTT essentially ran a cloud, of a huge pile of HP-UX servers with Oracle/JVM etc. somewhere in Yokohama which was running all the backend. When I said NTT went to big efforts to get companies on board this is what I mean: they were incredibly proactive about getting integrations into this happening, to the point of entirely hosting it on site if necessary and essentially doing the work themselves for anyone they thought valuable enough. I don't believe any version outside Japan ever replicated this, and it was the magic ingredient along with persistent data connections. The closest thing the west saw to that in practice was the Sidekick, but that never got the level of third party support. It's fairly widely understood that i-mode used CHTML but I'm unfamiliar with the lower levels of the networking stack. App wise there was Java but not normal J2ME. All I can remember that was unique was their scratchpad memory area (which was just way too big), and billing APIs! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoJa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoJa

kergonath 1y ago

> I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France Was it with Bouygues? IIRC they were basically the only provider to advertise i-mode. Anyway, i-mode might have been a flop, but for a brief moment in time I enjoyed being on the bleeding edge with things like Opera Mini on my Sony Ericsson. Those were the days.

fidotron 1y ago
> Was it with Bouygues? It was. For reasons that now escape me I was doing billing integration work for it.

cyberax 1y ago

> The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable On the contrary, J2ME was nearly useless without vendor-specific extensions. And the quality of implementations varied quite a bit.

kalleboo 1y ago

Another example of a really well-done J2ME app was Google Maps. It had GPS and street view support at the same time as iPhone only did tower location and Google wouldn't license them Street View. With a high-end Sony Ericsson feature phone, I could multitask(!) between Opera Mini, a J2ME twitter client, IRC client, train timetable app, Google Maps, etc better than a Symbian S60 smartphone could (and iPhone of course couldn't multitask at all) https://kalleboo.com/linked/se_j2me_multitask.jpg https://kalleboo.com/linked/se_j2me_multitask.jpg

vel0city 1y ago
I was there dude, I experienced that same thing. Too many people were unaware of what was available at the time.
bdavbdav 1y ago
IIRC the S60 multitasking was pretty decent. Holding the swishy app button seemed to pull up a list of running apps.

skhameneh 1y ago

> WAP/WML was a near total flop Not quite, WAP evolved into WAP 2.0 and WML was replaced with xHTML. For a long period of time WAP 2.0 was the only standard while mobile development evolved. Even as HTML support grew in the mobile space, there was a very solid duration of time where WAP 2.0 was the most supported across the majority of devices and browsers (in the mobile space). And FWIW, I wouldn’t consider WML a flop, because that was the only mobile standard supported on most phones before the iPhone.

Macha 1y ago

O2 in Ireland went relatively big into imode and it actually had decent uptick among local stuff. But then GPRS came about and phones started shipping sort of functional J2ME browsers that could do the "real web" and that was that. Opera Mini also was a big leap up in capabilities compared to the Sony Ericsson built in browse I was using on the k750i. Both in terms of compatibility and also the compressing reverse proxy stuff they did when data was being charged per megabyte.

pjmlp 1y ago

Symbian/J2ME was doing perfectly fine in Europe during 2005, source ex-Nokia over here, 2004 - 2010.