Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. And most of the devices that could actually do that properly were Nokias (MIDP was OK, but Nokias outsold MIDP phones ringtone-wise for an order of magnitude).
> Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads.
I don't remember app stores or game downloads existing up until iPhone and Android, let alone being profitable.
There was MIDP and J2ME, but they were so niche, and I'm only aware of them because of an practical course during university, circa 2008.
But maybe your regional context is different from mine (Germany).
They were definitely a thing, pushed heavily by carriers ("Vodafone live!" etc) with dedicated buttons on the devices that people would mostly press by accident. I don't think they were ever very popular with consumers but I bought a copy of Tetris and an offline travel guide from the Sony Ericsson store. Then you bought a new phone, nothing transferred over or could be redownloaded, and you said F this what a ripoff.
> pushed heavily by carriers ("Vodafone live!" etc) with dedicated buttons on the devices that people would mostly press by accident.
Like that fucking "Amazon Prime" (or something) button on my TV remote control, which does absolutely nothing except every now and then, when I press it by mistake, send me into an app I've never used and will in all probability never use.
They were a big thing you'd see everywhere around you (TV, magazines etc.), except that you probably classified them in your head under a different label because they were mostly about ringtones and wallpapers and accessed via premium SMS services that would respond with "WAP push" SMS with a download URL in it. Games were more expensive and less popular (though I still wouldn't call them "niche") as compatibility was a mess, but they sure were there way before 2008.
My regional context is Poland, but it couldn't have been much different in Germany - otherwise I wouldn't see a service exactly like that being parodied at last Chaos Communication Camp by... actually deploying a working SMS service on the camp's GSM network:)
I was at Vodafone. Pretty sure we had exactly the same service across all of Europe, especially because a good chunk of it was developed in Dusseldorf :)
