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> 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. Comp

by 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.

by lysace 1y ago

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.