If you had the displeasure of coding a moderately complex J2ME app - you'd know this it's not mere apologia. While Android fragmentation is terrible (and was worse in the android 1 era), J2ME was at least 10x worse - I haven't met a single person who disagrees with the idea that Android was a massive improvement over J2ME - I noticed not even you are making that argument, you're only chiding me for bringing it up.

Sun could have fixed it by availing Java SE on mobile devices and forcing vendors to implement the same APIs in the same java.smartphone.* packages - (they already had a Java TCK!), but they were not prepared for the smartphone era, sadly. Look at the CLDC[1] classes and tell me how one could write apps that could possibly compete with the iPhone apps in 2007.

1. Sadly - but predictably, Oracle nuked java.net which had documentation on CLDC 2.x/MIDP, I managed to find CLDC 1.1 documentation, the classes are surprisingly sparse, so J2ME was probably worse than I remember. https://docs.oracle.com/javame/config/cldc/ref-impl/cldc1.1/...