J2ME

Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 20 years (2007–2026), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with J2ME, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 11 complaints

Consent popups interrupt user intent and block a fluent experience2026-10-12
Game control interfaces were hopeless on J2ME phones, and sound was barely usable2025-11-20
Developers must get every carrier to sign apps, with no easy process2022-01-07
Apps behave differently across devices, so one build doesn't work on another2020-06-25
No on-device debugging, almost no tooling, println unsupported, so developers struggled2014-09-20
UI looks poor on some platforms and differs in bugs across handsets2014-09-19
Writing J2ME Swing-style apps was painful and made developers sick2012-04-30
Asked for camera permission every time it is first used after restart, breaking flow2011-11-29
Runtime asks permission for every directory on the path when saving a file, which is tedious2008-12-22
Most downloaded J2ME apps were unusable for a variety of reasons2008-06-05
No standard text entry, so developers cannot integrate input into their designs2007-05-03