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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 t

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?