Spot on.

There was barely an indie developer scene for mobile before the iphone.

I had worked for a company that spent 1 million dollars to make a J2ME game. It never even came out.

Ooh. Is this a story you can tell? I'd like to hear more about this.

Not much to tell. The cost was because of testing, but by the time the app actually ran, the band wasn't interested anymore and people's interest in handset games was waning.

How did testing end up costing a million dollars? Forgive my naiveté.

Testing and development cost so much because it had to work on 60 phone models and in most cases required rewrites and compiles from device to device.

This is also the reason most efforts on "artist apps" are for iOS. Fragmentation hurts!