On Europe Nokia and Sony phones were great at J2ME games, alongside Symbian, naturally like it happens with Android nowadays, when using flagship devices.
Obviously, write once, run everywhere didn't apply. But Nokia Series 40 was J2ME plus some Nokia extras and had pretty big install numbers until it petered out. Of course, I think all the J2ME platforms had platform extras, if not just platform quirks. Of course, Nokia platforms more or less disappeared in the US somewhere 2005ish (reportedly over disputes about shipping phones with a built in SIP client), and their worldwide popular models were virtually invisible to US population and US based tech news; only after moving to Windows Phone 7 did Nokia phones start showing up in the US in volume again.
Android didn't want to pay for a J2ME license, so they just put actual Java on there (or cough totally not Java cough, but happens to be mechanically translatable from JVM bytecode, depending on how close to a courtroom you are). Having file streams that you can seek in both directions is super handy, so Android has expanded to fill the niche that J2ME phones took on.
Sidenote: I would love to read a retrospective of whatever happened to Java on the desktop since. There's an alternate universe out there where we're writing cross platforms apps in Java instead of Electron or Flutter.