Agree. At this point I'm a little bewildered at what iOS and Android has brought to mobile development that wasn't already in j2me, at least in a preliminary way.

At the start of iOS it was "look, pretty icons" and "no more permission popups". But, most platforms had icons anyway, and all the apps now get the annoying popups for the same set of permissions (except for networking) that was the bug bear of j2me (at the time). iOS and Android got rid of all the permission boxes for a better UX.

So, we're left with the expectation of a seamless web. But it never occurs because of endless permission issues, of which the platforms try to reduce by providing a one-size-fits-all cloud solution (iCloud and Google), both of which allow relentless advertising & gamification of our personal information. It's so bad that governments all over are racing toward digital "identities".

I'll take the simplicity of j2me any day thankyou. The development environment was GBs smaller and faster and the problem set is pretty much the same. At least with j2me there was the idea of responsibility to data usage (I generally only get 3G, even now) as opposed to 40MB apps that download 100's more. All the apps I developed during that time were offline first and synced when available.

The real complexity I see is in the consumption of video and hi res images as well as the interaction with other apps (eg share menu). Unless I'm seriously mistaken, everything else was in j2me (even opengl). All the other complexity is in the tools we have these days & endless rhetoric on which ungainly monster is better than the next.

This is true, I started with Java ME too with Eclipse IDE then proceeded to integrating Blackberry SDK and then it started from there. Mobile development's phase right Blackberry disappeared never recovered, it went 0 to 100 real quick from that very moment.

I was still hacking some J2ME for a Nokia app then Samsung released an Android phone and I was like wtf is an Android.

> and I was like wtf is an Android.

Did you ever find that out? :D

Unfortunately yes.

Honestly, I find it more than a little ironic that the author is arguing against single-page web apps and then praises native apps as “doing it right”.

Native apps are built and run in a way FAR closer to how single page web apps work in that the browser becomes the runtime environment and the server becomes mostly just an API.

And you are not likely to ever see the kind of fluid results from a traditional full page render web app that you do in mobile.

And mobile at this point has more edge cases to develop for than modern browsers.

But the difference is, as I see it, there’s way less bickering on mobile over “the right way” because most developers use the native stack and instead of complaining about everything they think is hard, they roll up their sleeves and build a good product.

Maybe if we all stopped whining about single page apps being hard and started worrying about making a great product, then we too could match the quality of a nice native app built by devs like yourself.

There’s more bickering on Android development in my opinion. There’s the Google way of Android Architecture Component, and now the up and coming Jetpack Compose. There’s huge mobile teams on Viper. Mid size companies on MVVM or RxJava. There’s the rest on MVP, MVC, etc.