Qualcomm BREW

» see brewmp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

brew was a cdma thing. turkey ran gsm end-to-end. our carrier stack was turkcell on gsm 900, later joined by avea and vodafone on the same gsm spectrum. the cdma2000 network class that brew lived on did not exist in our market. so the entire brew era passed me by at the network layer (close enough). i never owned a phone that could run a brew app, i never saw "get it now" on a screen in person.

qualcomm shipped brew in september 2001 as the runtime layer for downloadable apps on cdma feature phones. ktfreetel in korea was the first carrier to deploy it that november. in those days. verizon followed in march 2002 in san diego, nationwide on june 17 2002, under a brand they called get it now. the math at the time was that verizon had about 30 million cdma subscribers in the US and almost none of them could install an app on their phone. brew gave the carrier a way to sell ringtones, wallpapers, java-like java-class games and pre-iphone utilities through an over-the-air store that ran on flip phones.

the platform spread. sprint nextel, us cellular, metropcs all signed up on the US side. kddi in japan ran it on au flip phones. china telecom shipped it on cdma2000 handsets. kt and sk telecom both adopted it in korea. by the 2004 to 2010 stretch, hundreds of millions of cdma feature phones worldwide had a brew runtime on them and an icon labelled something like "get it now" or "media mall" or "kddi au" depending on the carrier. it was the pre-app-store app store, on the side of the smartphone history that did not win.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

brew was a c/c++ runtime, not a java vm. that was the technical break from java me. honestly, java me ran on a kvm interpreter on top of whatever kernel the phone shipped with, brew sat closer to the metal and could call qualcomm chipset features directly. the trade was the obvious one, brew apps could be tighter and faster but they were tied to qualcomm silicon. java me apps were portable across nokia symbian and motorola and sony ericsson on gsm networks too.

in those days. most third-party developers who could afford to ported their game or utility to both runtimes. european devs leaned java me only because the brew install base outside the cdma carriers was negligible. american devs targeting verizon shipped brew first. it was the same dual-binary headache every pre-smartphone games studio went through.

~ get it now ~

i saw the verizon ads from a distance, mostly. get it now was the consumer brand that put a name on the brew platform for the american market. it launched on verizon flip phones in march 2002 with a small catalog: ringtones, screensavers, simple text-based news apps, a couple of branded games. by 2005 the catalog had grown to thousands of items, with carrier-billed pricing of one dollar to ten dollars per download. you paid through your monthly bill.

but the cultural moment was real. for a verizon flip phone owner between roughly 2003 and 2009, get it now was where you bought tetris and where you got your nba team's ringtone. it was the closest the pre-iphone US carrier ecosystem ever got to an app store. then the iphone came out in june 2007 on at and t, three months later verizon started losing customers to gsm by way of the iphone exclusive period. by the time the iphone reached verizon in february 2011 the brew era was already a slow funeral.

~ how it ended ~

qualcomm renamed the platform brew mp in 2009 in an effort to keep it relevant against android. honestly, the rebrand did not change the trajectory. android phones cost the same as a brew feature phone by 2011 and ran a real browser. by 2012 to 2013 the cdma carriers stopped commissioning new brew handsets. qualcomm formally announced sunset of brew mp development in 2014.

the runtime kept operating on shipping handsets for years after that. verizon ran its cdma2000 3g network until december 2022 when the network was finally turned off. some brew feature phones kept working on that network up to the end. the brewmp developer page itself stayed online in archive form until july 23 2021. the cultural moment ended in 2014 with the qualcomm announcement, the network shutdown in 2022 was the physical end of any phone that still ran a brew app.

~ what survived ~

not much, in the consumer sense. brew apps were tied to specific handsets and to carrier accounts on a qualcomm sdk version. once verizon turned off the cdma2000 spectrum in 2022 there was no way to install a brew binary anywhere. the catalogs are gone, the developer accounts are gone, the over-the-air download servers are gone.

the platform left a footprint in carrier billing, though. the model brew pioneered, where the carrier charged you for an app on your phone bill and split revenue with the developer, became the model every premium-sms app and every wireless-billing partnership ran on for the next decade. the cdma feature phone app store of 2003 was a financial blueprint, not a software one. it was a small thing that the iphone took for granted by 2008.

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