14 DAY TRIAL // Opera Mini, now the world’s most popular mobile web browser, crossed the 50-million-unique-monthly-user mark in January 2010, according to an official report by its developers. The company has recently disclosed its plans to submit Opera Mini to Apple for approval in the App Store, and is confident that the Mac maker has every reason to allow it to run on iPhones alongside Safari, Apple’s own web browser.
Opera Software reveals that Opera Mini took 28 months to garner its first ten million users. However, the last ten million were snagged in just three months, the company’s figures showed. As noted above, Opera recently announced plans for having Opera Mini work on the iPhone. It recently announced that it would preview Opera Mini for the iPhone at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain, next week. Attending partners and reporters will witness a live demonstration of the software.
More recently, Christen Krogh revealed that Opera wasn’t concerned about Apple’s policy to reject iPhone applications that duplicated existing functionality. According to a report by PC Advisor, Opera's chief development officer said, "Opera Mini is compatible with every requirement for the App Store. We don't think it falls under any of the excluded technologies." "There aren't any identical applications on the iPhone," Christen Krogh argued, yet Apple may beg to differ.
Softpedia note
First of all, no application is identical to another, and while Opera does have a number of extra features, those key benefits may actually dig its own hole. Features like Speed Dial and Tabs are likely to make it a tad too competitive, prompting Apple to find something "wrong" with it, therefore not approve it for iPhone use. We wouldn’t want to suggest Apple is an unethical company, but there’s an offset chance the Mac maker doesn’t care much for Opera’s window to the Internet.
Krogh acknowledged that Apple’s iPhone boasted its own web browser, but argued that, "Opera Mini is a different kind of browser, so we cannot see any conflict with any requirements in the App Store."
Softpedia note
The very fact that Krogh is faced with having to point out this seemingly non-existing competition between the two browsers already suggests Apple may just keep it away from the iPhone. It happened before, and those were not internal errors. Many times has Apple issued emails to developers, justifying the rejection of an app, saying the respective software contained features that duplicated the iPhone’s built-in solutions. We’d say the Opera web browser boasts quite a number of such features, while Apple will not want people falling in love with it, if it proves to work like a charm. Let’s not even go into the Opera-on-iPad scenario.