Opera Submits Opera Mini to the App Store. Your Move, Apple
By Harry McCracken | Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 3:07 am
Norwegian browser company Opera Software wants to be the second company to release a browser for the iPhone–after Apple, of course. And so it’s announcing today that it’s submitted Opera Mini to Apple for App Store approval. Opera says that it considered charging for the app, but has decided to give it away.
The company touts its server-side compression technology as making Opera Mini up to six times faster than Apple’s Mobile Safari. When I tried Mini on the iPhone last week at the South by Southwest conference, I didn’t see that speed boost–but an Opera representative recently told me that Mini was misconfigured at SxSW. And I was impressed with the browser in other ways.
Will Apple approve Mini? Assuming that it follows the iPhone developer agreement and doesn’t involve security risks, I think it would be a horrible mistake if it didn’t. Safari is going to be the iPhone’s dominant browser no matter what, and spiking Mini would resurrect Google Voice-like concerns that Apple is unwilling to permit competitors to build iPhone apps that rational people might prefer to Apple’s own wares.
It’ll be good for iPhone owners, Opera, Apple, and the American way if Apple approves Mini without delay. And I’m in an optimistic mood. So I’m hereby predicting that it’ll show up on the App Store within the next couple of weeks.
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March 23rd, 2010 at 12:30 pm
it’s a trap. apple denies it and opera will file anti trust with united states of europe
October 22nd, 2010 at 3:07 am
How is it a trap? I don't get you logic at all
March 24th, 2010 at 12:42 am
It’ll be interesting to see if Apple approves this or not. I hope it does.
March 25th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
> It’ll be good for iPhone owners, Opera, Apple, and the
> American way if Apple approves Mini without delay
If it were the desktop-class “Opera” browser, I might agree with you. But this is the feature phone -class “Opera Mini”. It works like a man in the middle attack. The user’s passwords are all given to Opera. The contents of even a secure, encrypted session (such as online banking) are all given to Opera. The user has zero privacy, zero security.
Maybe on a feature phone you’re willing to give all that up in order to have a Web browser, and maybe your expectations are set low when you install it, and you decide not to do any banking with it, or login to anything at all with it. On an iPhone, the user is going to expect that Opera Mini works like Safari or any desktop class browser, they’re going to login to Facebook and their bank and a hundred other things. Their expectation will be that if they login to their bank, it is just them and the bank that can see the decrypted information, as it’s been on the Web since the early days. That is not the case with “Opera Mini”. Their expectation will be that since the app is from App Store, Apple has already made sure the app doesn’t violate their privacy.
You can see the problem with expectations already, because people are talking about “Opera Mini for iPhone” as if it is “Opera for iPhone.” They’re talking about speed tests without mentioning the privacy and security implications.
Further, “Opera Mini” is not HTML5 compatible, unlike the “Opera” browser and Safari and Firefox and Chrome and IE9. So “Opera Mini” not only breaks the Web, it prevents the user from running Web apps, which is the open app platform on iPhone. With all the sturm and drang about App Store approvals, it’s hardly mentioned that you can download apps from any server in the world through the iPhone’s Safari browser, written in an open API and running in an open source application environment. You cannot do that with “Opera Mini”. Ironically, “Opera Mini” being in App Store would drive users away from open apps and into App Store, which is the optional and commercial app platform on iPhone, because the user would have no more access to open apps, which they have had since day 1 on iPhone, well before App Store opened.
The lack of HTML5 is also not being talked about, because again, people are assuming this is the “Opera” browser from the desktop, not “Opera Mini” from feature phones.
There was a huge uproar when Dragon Dictation was found to be uploading the user’s Contacts, even when they were anonymyzing them first. Do you really think Apple should approve an app that uploads the URL’s of all of the Web pages you visit, all of the logins and passwords you use, and stores the decrypted information from your banking sessions on the developer’s server? That is 1000 times worse. The PR hit from not approving “Opera Mini” is microscopic compared to the PR hit of approving “Opera Mini” and having App Store users lose their minds when they find out that the developer had access to every bit of data they put into “Opera Mini”.
Remember that a key feature of iPhone is it does not expect or require you to have PC skills. That is part of what has made it so popular, because so very few people have PC skills. There are 5 times as many phones as PC’s, not the other way around. You’re not required to know what “malware” is, or understand how “encryption” works in order to use an app. Those things are NOT the user’s responsibility. That is Apple’s responsibility on iPhone. People buy iPhone because of that. They enjoy iPhone because of that. Nobody else is offering that yet.
So there is no way in the world that Apple should approve this. iPhone users place their trust in Apple when they install a native app from App Store. That is the whole point of App Store: zero malware, the safest native apps ever.
> it’s a trap. apple denies it and opera will file
> anti trust with united states of europe
I agree with you that it’s a trap. However, not for anti-trust, but just for PR.
There can be no anti-trust. Apple is not Microsoft, who hold 2 monopolies (100% of the dollars in 2 former markets go to Microsoft.) Apple has less than 20% of the phone market. It is not even close to a monopoly. RIM sells more phones in the US, and Nokia sells more worldwide.
Apple is not even the exclusive provider of iPhone apps, you can download many apps from Google, including Google Voice, and you can download thousands of others from all over the Web. You cannot tell by looking at an iPhone home screen which apps are from App Store and which are not. You can download the Flickr app from App Store, or you can download it from Flickr. Same with Facebook and many others. What Opera has done is submit their “Opera Mini” product to be carried in Apple’s retail store. Apple can carry it or not in the same way as any retailer can carry your product or not.
So Opera is trolling for hits, trolling for mindshare, trolling for opportunities to say they have the most used mobile browser (wrong, it is iPhone’s Safari that alone represents over 50% of mobile browsing) and say they have the most popular mobile browser with 50 million users (wrong, there are more than 50 million iPhones, let alone iPod touch). It is a disingenuous PR campaign from top to bottom. They have been doing PR for months now and only just submitted the app. They are playing the victim from start to finish, purely for PR gain.
March 25th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
“Norwegian browser company Opera Software wants to be the second company to release a browser for the iPhone–after Apple, of course.”
This is patently incorrect. I’ve been running the Nightglow browser from Synthereal on my iPhone for around a year now, for instance. A quick search for “web browser” on the App Store brings up a scad of results for other Apps.
Fact-check, anyone?
And if Apple has approved all these other Safari replacements, why wouldn’t they approve Opera? But then, the normal/mundane submission & approval of an App wouldn’t result in much discussion or interest in this article or the website here, now would it. 😛
In summary, probably just meaningless innuendo and hype to stir up traffic. Move along, citizen, nothing much to see here.
— glitch.@#$%!
March 25th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Glitch–as far as I know, all the “Web browsers” in the App Store use Safari as their rendering engines and are therefore what are sometimes called “plug-outs”–a sort of a plug-in that wraps itself around another application. Opera Mini is a full-blown application that doesn’t rely on Safari.
–Harry