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Opera Mini Not Rejected From iPhone (Yet)
danaris writes in to inform us that John Gruber has done some digging on the reported rejection from the App Store of Opera Mini, and has written up his findings. Some choice excerpts: "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. ... If what they've done for the iPhone is [to get] a Java ME runtime running on the iPhone — it's clearly outside the bounds of the iPhone SDK Agreement. ... What Opera would need to do to have a version of Opera Mini they could submit to the App Store would be to port the entire client software to the C and Objective-C APIs officially supported on the iPhone. It could well be that even then, Apple would reject it from the App Store on anti-competitive grounds — but contrary to this week's speculation, that has not happened."
Fuck Apple and the iPhone, cuz I've got the FP!!!!
PS
OPERA > ALL
...would they port the JavaME version? Doesn't that seem a bit circuitous when Apple provides a sophisticated toolkit to compile their Mac codebase down? It's not like the iPhone is underpowered.
Something doesn't quite seem right here.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
So for now the only issue is that Apple's closed system and iron-fisted grip means that the arbitrary rule that Java mustn't be allowed to run on iPhone is the stupid close-minded thing holding developers back this week.
Wonderful.
Why exactly is Apple worried about people making different browsers/media players for the iPhone/iPod touch? They already paid the ~$250 for Safari/iPod player so why does it matter if they want to use VLC instead and use Opera to browse? They bought the hardware. I could understand them rejecting such projects as an Amazon MP3 store or something, but media players and browsers? Come on Apple, we already gave you our $$$ for that.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Oh lawd!
Before a non-official non-rejection can be replaced by an official rejection or non-rejection, non-official, non-rejected applications must be ported from any possible non-official, non-rejected application frameworks to the official API of non-rejected, non-official but potentially officially rejected applications: C and Objective-C APIs officially supported by the iPhone App Store.
Non-official, non-rejected applications written in official non-rejected APIs but officially submitted to the iPhone App Store may be officially rejected at the discretion of Apple.
Or.. It _could_ be that the Opera rep is just stating something which no one can verify. In the end Opera gets goodwill and great press while Apple gets the opposite. Opera has allegedly built cool stuff which and Apple probably would have rejected. Either way.. FUD and vapor all over.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
There's no question that Apple's iPhone/iPod touch behavior is anti-competitive. As Apple gains market power, rising toward #1 in the smartphone market, such behavior might also be illegal in at least some jurisdictions. Apple needs to tread very carefully here.
No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).
On an unrelated note, I wish Apple would spend less time making absurd rules like that and more time making their developer site actually work. It took me nearly 20 minutes just to manage to log in to view the SDK Agreement.
"My understanding, based on information from informed sources who do not wish to be identified because they were not authorized by their employers,
Big surprise. More cowards who are too afraid to state their names but want to talk to act like big shots even though they aren't authorized to talk to anyone. I'd love to find people like that to fire them if I was a manager at a company like that. It was probably loose lips like that which caused this rumor to get out in the first place.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Slashdot is getting more FUD and hate-articles lately, might that be? First announcing something bad about a company, practically begging for hating/dissociating posts, then clearing it with articles like this? At least we discussed ... very insightful. I used to like posts that point out the FUD about companies and poke at flaws and inaccuracy in articles, evidence and arguments.
This topic earlier
In between: Have we discussed how awesome the new Ubuntu is often enough?
Mod this troll.
Apple is paid over 2 years, for the phone. It has to support AT&T (or other worldwide service) If they have a bricked phone, Apple & AT&T have to give them another.... If you want to buy the $700 unlocked phone, and have no support, have at it. No java, no flash, no way - wait until you see why...
I thinkwebkit is the fastest, most efficient code for HTML. Google agrees, but Opera selling a service - if it breaks down AT&T would have to do support/replacement/repair? Let's see if they do submit it, what happens. Though no JAVA is clearly going to take some work.
F**k Apple and the dimwits that run it - give me some real news. Enough BS.
Fudge packers. I don't care what those b*ds do and don't.
Except I'm not. Is this how we're going to keep Apple on the front page like, forever? Stop the presses! OMG! Apple doesn't reject an app! Think about this, and try to see how silly you people are. What's tomorrow's headline? "Sun doesn't submit an app. Apple doesn't notice"...That's worth at least two write ups right there. Jeeze! Even idle isn't this absurd.
What?
The article says...
That's totally different from saying it was rejected. It may well be the case that they read Apple's agreement and understood that Apple would not allow them to release it... and thus they didn't need to submit it.
In the same way, I already know that the US Government will not allow me to sell marijuana-laced brownies. I don't need to apply to the FDA to find that out, since it's already well understood from the law.
I'm surprised nobody pointed this out earlier.
Actually opera mini team has ported opera to C before : http://operawatch.com/news/2007/12/opera-mini-ported-to-brew-platform.html
so they have done it before and they have done it on iphone too i think
Don't get me wrong: Opera makes a great desktop browser, but having suffered with Opera Mini on several different smartphones, I am not eagerly awaiting its arrival on the iPhone.
Safari was probably 80% of the reason I *GOT* an iPhone. Finally, a web browser that shows me pages like they *should* look---not horribly degraded pages that are nearly impossible to navigate.
Granted, it's a little silly to not allow the browser, but if I were Apple I'd reject it on the grounds of being a substandard alternative to a great product.
lol, they should release it as a homebrew app to be run on custom iPhone firmware. I doubt Sun would take kindly to it, but it would give more users incentive to get custom firmware in the first place, despite the fact I would prefer safari over opera as far as web rendering goes, but opera's extra features would make it worthwhile.
Speculative story with no facts shoots down throw away quote in blog. yawn
Of course this came from livejournal, I don't know why I didn't assume that right off the bat: source
Gruber will come up with a justification even if Steve Jobs urinates in his face and shits on his head. Among all fanbois, John is fanboi par excellence.
Get a G1 and run android. You get Linux, an open source implementation of Java called Dalvik, and source code to the base applications, plus access to registering your app in their application market, and freedom to publish your own app and let people download it.
And it has a keyboard.
It's about Opera having thought of a innovative way to get a browsing-experience into a phone where (apart from the screensize) the network is a bottleneck. Doing the browsing at the server-end, transferring images to a phone instead of HTML is kind of elegant and, given that you trust the provider to anonimize you, can even have nice privacy implications; you can parse text from HTML, but you can't parse text from an image easily.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Much of John Gruber's site is an apology journal for Apple's less reasonable activity. When he doesn't have a concrete argument, he resorts to specious hand-waving; when his hands are tired out, he resorts to whispers from "sources". He's the worst sort of evangelist - he's on full warp not when he's giving praise for Apple, but when he's insulting some individual or group he disagrees with.
I am typing this from my primary workstation, an iMac. I think OS X is a fine mainstream operating system. But I don't think Apple are a particularly stellar corporation. I heartily recommend people actually read a few articles from Gruber's daringfireball.net to analyse the fallacies in his reasoning otherwise. Frustrated by his words, you may wish to respond on his site, but be warned: like any zealot, he sees opposition as justification for his mission. At best, you'll be ignored; at worst, something you say will be the subject of a mocking article.
An practitioner earns his reputation in some field - as genius, mediocre, or buffoon - and Gruber has, by his site, earnt the third label.
If what they've done for the iPhone is [to get] a Java ME runtime running on the iPhone
Opera Mini has already been ported to non-Java version(s), stated by haavard here, referring to a Opera press release from as far back as 2007. Gruber speculates that it's because a JavaScript intepreter would clearly break with the SDK Agreement, however as seen in this interview, Opera Mini doesn't have to interpret JavaScript at all, nor render web pages - this can all be done on the servers.
It's Darth Jobs all over again.
"I find your lack of Objective-C... disturbing."
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Well, suffice it to say that people have a variety of opinions on this. I bought an iPhone (mainly due to some work-related reasons).
Safari, and the lack of an Opera option, were the main reason I really wanted to go with a Blackberry and NOT buy the iPhone. IMHO, Safari is great for making iPhone commercials that look cool, but in terms of usability, it has some serious problems, mainly that you cannot change the size of the text, independent of the layout. So, if I zoom in to make the text readable, then I have to constantly scroll right, and then left, and then right, and then left, and then right, and so on. Opera handles this much more gracefully, albeit with less glamour. Another problem with Safari on iPhone is that it crashes every few minutes. It is extremely unstable. Furthermore, Safari on iPhone doesn't let me sync my bookmarks and other things that would be awfully nice to have on iPhone.
I'm happy if you (and others) enjoy Safari and don't think these shortcomings are important to you, but personally I'd love to have some viable option, preferably Opera.
What do you mean it came from LiveJournal? It was on Slashdot first you dipshit. Just because you see it on another website doesn't mean it came from there.
That's a recent modification of the original troll. Most likely some 4chan copypasta. People use it instead of saying first post. They don't realize that trolling doesn't achieve the same effect when everyone's expecting it, or that the board employs a sophisticated moderation system to deal with it.
The nice thing about it is that the poster will likely alone -- having been rejected decades earlier by friends and family for being a mouth-breathing tool -- with only his virginity to keep him company.
Who said that opera mini was rejected from the Apple Store? Not anyone from Opera for sure.
The quote that started it all:
"Mr. von Tetzchner said 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."
I don't see anyone talking about a rejection, it looks like they're talking about terms of use.
But I'm not sure how "No interpreted code may be downloaded" can become "no other rendering engines". Can someone elaborate?
/. apple bid, film at 11
Is why i don't want an iphone. Open source phones for the win.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
What is "anti-competitive" about allowing Opera to release their browser on Apple's phone?
This is a complete misunderstanding of the term "anti-competitive" -- or a lack of the most basic English skills, take your pick.
The action of Apple's rejection of the browser on Apple's phone would be an example of Apple behaving anti-competitively -- after all, when the quantity of competing products in a given market increases, this is obviously an increase in competition.
Thus, permitting Opera to release the browser on the iPhone would be exemplify increased competition -- it would be "pro-competitive", to turn-around the submitter's incorrect phrase.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Sounds like microsoft's sidekick/hiptop.
iPhone not rejected from Opera Mini (Yet)
Maybe I'm just silly, but iPhone needs a simpler language. Objective C is freaky. We need something like Python with a simplified group of graphics and communication classes.
1. They don't have a SD Port, cause they don't want you getting cheaper memory to beef it up and hold more apps. 2. They control all the apps that go on this thing. They don't want you putting VOIP on it to circumvent AT&T phone plans. 3. They don't have MMS, they want you to rack up the bits (even though AT&T makes money on MMS) 4. They don't have a removable battery because they want to sell you a new IPHONE. 5. They don't just let people load apps using the USB cable, why not? The clueless that buy this P.O.S. will get what they deserve total lock in to AT&T / Apple's universe. They will always be wanting the next feature that will never quite work right and be putting their old sub par equipment on ebay.
Paul E. Bahre