EZappli (BREW)

~ the obit ~

Qualcomm named this thing as a joke about Java. If Java was coffee, their runtime for CDMA phones would be beer, so BREW it was, the Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless, sitting on top of Qualcomm's own REX OS. KDDI announced on 29 January 2003 that it was putting BREW on au handsets, and the service went live on 21 February with a Toshiba phone, the A5304T, carrying three preinstalled apps including NAVITIME.

What made BREW different from the Java service au already ran was that it compiled down to native code with access to the handset's internals, and that apps could talk to a network without going through the EZweb gateway. KDDI's own announcement framed part of the appeal as a route into the corporate market, which it had barely touched until then. The A5304T gave BREW apps a 1.2 megabyte folder of their own, against five megabytes for ordinary data, and that was the budget for everything you installed.

From 1 July 2003 the Java service and the BREW service were given one brand between them, EZappli, distinguished only by a letter in brackets. The Java half had previously been ezplus. The naming shuffled again in the spring 2011 lineup, when a new Java-based service took the (J) suffix and the BREW service became EZappli (B).

It worked, at scale, for a long time. KDDI's own release says cumulative downloads passed one hundred million on 16 April 2006, with roughly 2,500 titles available at the end of that March. By September 2016 almost every au handset still shipping had the BREW runtime on it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ no stray apps ~

You could not write something and put it on your own phone. Generating the signature file and switching a handset into transfer mode were privileges held by KDDI's official content providers, so what the Japanese internet called a 野良アプリ, a stray app, could be run on a PC emulator and nowhere else. Even an official provider could not download an unverified build onto a handset over the air. Until Open Appli Player arrived, an ordinary person who wanted to put something on an au phone was writing Flash Lite.

There were also hard ceilings on how much an app could talk. Official providers were held to a self-imposed cap of three megabytes of traffic per app, and the handset enforced six megabytes a day across all of EZappli, because some providers ignored the first limit and users got packet bills they could not pay. A few 2010 models shipped with the cap lifted.

~ the contract ~

On 28 April 2016 KDDI published the end nearly two years in advance, and the reason it gave is the unusual part. The license agreement with Qualcomm that KDDI needed in order to distribute EZappli (B) expired on 31 March 2018, and rather than renew it for a shrinking base, KDDI let the platform go on the same date. Users on compatible 3G handsets were down about 40 percent against 2013. International roaming for those handsets ended that March too.

Qualcomm had already stopped developing BREW by then. Its own platform had been wound down at the end of 2014, which means au ran the thing for more than three years after the company that invented it had finished with it.

~ what stayed on the handset ~

The shutdown was a distribution shutdown, so the software did not vanish on the day. Apps already installed, preinstalled or downloaded, kept running. The trap was that deleting one, or resetting the handset, made anything that was not factory-fitted impossible to get back, and any app whose specification changed after April 2018 stopped being usable including the factory ones. A phone from that era still runs its EZappli software today, until somebody deletes an app or resets the handset.

Japan had the most advanced mobile software market in the world through the years I was on dial-up and then on a slow TTNet line, and almost none of it was visible from Turkey. I was aware of i-mode as a thing people wrote articles about, in the way you are aware of a country's railway system. The detail that travels is the cause of death: this platform was not outcompeted or abandoned, it was switched off because a contract reached its end date.

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