(2024-07-08) The future of keypad mobile applications (or lack thereof)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
