Many years before the first iPhone break in the stores or Google even think about making a mobile OS, J2ME enabled phones were already in the market and mobile carriers already sold apps and games to their users.

It was the beginning of content download age and the money of these sales start to become relevant in the carriers receipts.

At this time, the mobile phones’s internet was so slow (when available) and hardware capabilities so small that almost only offline games could deliver a good user experience. In such a world, most carriers blocked device’s resources for “untrusted” JavaME apps and games changing java security in phone’s virtual machine. They have done this in the name of security but the real intent was to avoid users buying or using apps without paying them for that. The feature was used to monopolize the market.

Because of the stunning market growth, many small companies started to develop to JavaME and because the device’s blockings they were forced to arrange a deal with carriers. Unfortunately, carriers didn’t have time to certify all content they were asked to so some companies started to make catalogs, aggregating smaller companies content and dealing with carriers. These companies are called mobile aggregators.

At this time if you were a developer or a small company, you needed to build your game or app by your own, port it to as many devices you could, deal with the aggregators to ask them please to put your app in their catalog and pray to receive a good position on the carriers deck. If everything went ok and your app have a good sale, you would receive 10-15% of the money after some months, carriers would receive 50% and aggregators 30-35%. Don’t forget your app could easily sell almost nothing because a bad position on the deck or another reason. The investment must be done by developers and only a few could reach ROI.

As the years pass by, hardware and internet connections became stronger and some new technologies have appeared and gained market share. Smartphones with Windows Mobile eating palm’s market, Iphone with this fantastic user interface and Google’s Android are good examples.

There is not so easy to block functionalities in these new platforms and in some of them it’s not even possible.

At the same time, with the users growth drastic reduction and sensitive quality difference between carriers service disappearing, much of conquering new users and maintaining old users strategies needed to include high end phones with shinning new capabilities.

This seemed to be a small change but looking closely you will see a tremendous transfer of power from carriers to vendors. Apple’s iPhone is the most important example. Verizon is losing market because they didn’t accept Steve Jobs rules for apple store and people just got crazy about iPhone and move over to AT&T.

A good part of apple store’s success on selling applications is based on the 70% revenue and the easiness of publishment that developers have never seen before. Even needing to learn an alien language (Objective C), developers and small companies that moved from JavaME to iPhone found the new world much more friendly and they will not go back.

Now let’s review Google. Even wanting to use Java, they decided to create Android and ignore JavaME. Is it mere coincidence? I don’t think so. They knew carriers weren’t give up on JavaME blockings and that would be easier starting a new thing.

After Nokia’s (mainly a hardware vendor) agreement with Microsoft (software vendor), I will not be surprised if Nokia new phones start to came without JavaME to focus on .Net.

If this become true, there will no big names defending JavaME and without pressure, carriers will have no reason to remove the old restrictions and to change old rules. In this new era of many unrestricted technologies and old unfriendly JavaME, it will not make any sense to develop for it anymore and without developers, JavaME will probably fade away and die in some years from now. JavaME is like the first gnu trying to cross a river full of alligators. It’s being eaten while other gnus manage to cross the river.