(2024-07-08) The future of keypad mobile applications (or lack thereof)
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If you've been keeping your eyes on what's going on with current
NON-smartphone hardware lineups, then you might already have realized the 
situation is more than grim. I mean, it looks like the only LTE-enabled 
featurephone chipset is Unisoc UMS9117 or UMS9117L. And all the phones that 
have it run proprietary Mocor OS by Unisoc as well, modded a bit for HMD in 
case of Nokias. After Nokia 3310 3G, they also fully dropped J2ME support, 
and the MiniJ/MRP support had been dropped even earlier, so right now all 
the apps are fully compiled-in by the firmware builder. No customization 
whatsoever, despite the hardware itself being more than capable of doing it.

And now, trying to fill the vacuum, they started offering "cloud apps". Of
course not for the phones sold where I live, and yes, the lack of this 
feature was proven to be a pure marketing gimmick. But those who do have 
these, find an adaptation of the Puffin browser interacting with the device 
in a fashion of Opera Mini (with the browser itself being a very dumb 
client) but providing a more seamless interaction with modern web 
applications. There is an entire platform provided by CloudMosa, there is 
some developer documentation and community of real people developing for it 
but... WTF happened to using your native offline resources? You have a 1 GHz 
CPU there, come on! Instead, you opt to constantly depend on the internet 
connectivity even for the tasks that are traditionally offline, blindly 
trust Puffin/CloudMosa and share all your in-app actions with who-knows-who 
every time you launch anything on that "platform" proxying all your 
requests. An ideal scenario for total control over "the next billion", as 
they put it, in the NWO era where users own nothing anymore.

My take on it is simple: if you can't invent anything better, just return
J2ME support. We'll figure it out ourselves.

--- Luxferre ---