14 DAY TRIAL // Reports saying Opera Mini had been rejected by Apple for use on iPhone may not have been entirely accurate, according to further research conducted by John Gruber, MacRumors reveals. Allegedly, the Opera team hasn't even been able to submit the web browser to Apple for App Store approval, therefore rejection is out of the question, says the source.
“My understanding, based on information from informed sources who do not wish to be identified because they were not authorized by their employers, is that Opera has developed an iPhone version of Opera Mini - but they haven't even submitted it to Apple, let alone had it be rejected.”
Moreover, the New York Times story pointing out to a built-in JavaScript interpreter as the main reason for rejection is also being denied. Opera Mini apparently doesn't contain such an interpretive code.
In a nutshell, it works like this: you request a URL in Opera Mini, and it makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. Opera's proxy server connects to the web server hosting the requested URL, and renders the page into an image. This image is then transmitted (in a proprietary format called OBML - Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client, and Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective - it's faster to transmit, because only OBML (a compressed binary format) is transmitted to the mobile device over the phone network, and far faster to render on slow mobile processors.
However, it is highly possible that Apple is making efforts to keep Opera out of the App Store and, implicitly, iPhone. According to a blog post of an Opera employee, Apple is indeed accusing Opera of being competitive with its own solutions. The post entitled “Opera Mini for the iPhone is ready, but Apple doesn't want you to use it” points out to the NY Times report citing Opera's CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner that “Opera’s engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won’t let the company release it because it competes with Apple’s own Safari browser.”
Neither source managed to indicate whether Opera Mini had indeed been submitted to the App Store for approval.