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Apple Approves Opera Mini For iPhone
andylim writes "Opera today announced its popular mobile browser, Opera Mini, has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store. Opera Mini will be available in less than 24 hours, market by market, as a free download. Here's the download URL for when it goes live."
how did opera get this through the app store approval process!?
...all powerful application overlord, for your unending generosity. How shall we ever repay you?
The summary suggests that this has yet to be released, although the reviews on the linked site are all negative and all complain that Opera isn't as good as Safari. How do they know?.. Am I missing something?
And it seems to be incredibly fast. However, incredibly insecure from what I've heard. Also, the iPhone auto-correct for typing does not seem to work.
Opera had already submitted its Opera Mini browser for iPhone and it was rejected. ...
Get your facts straight before you start kissing Steve Jobs
it hass passed without any hassle and is now available for everyone, so there's really nothing going on at all.
Whilst the positive press around Opera's browser does certainly generate interest in it, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Apple is a benevolent dictator which treats apps equally when they compete with its own. Did you consider that one of the reasons the Opera browser may have being accepted is because of the attention that Opera brought to the subject? It is certainly possible that Apple's decision to allow the app would have been affected by the fact that Opera is a European company involved in a high-profile ongoing EU antitrust case regarding web browsers. Rejecting the app would probably have triggered an antitrust complaint from Opera, and that is the kind of attention that Apple could do without.
Opera Mini is indeed a simple viewer for images remotely calculated on Opera servers.
This has the advantage of lowering the data transmitted to your phone (actually cost-effective if you are volume-limited), and the disadvantage of providing some unexpected behaviors whenever local things like active buttons etc. are expected to be loaded on your device (I say *some*)
In fact Opera also offers a full browser, named Opera Mobile, on all sorts of phones (on my Nokia for instance, aside Nok's one), but that one, Mobile, isn't ported on the iPhone. Wonder why ;-)
Herve S.
...it will probably be approved.
And to those not understanding the Flash issue, it really is about revenue. By allowing Flash, it removes authorization control from Apple. Like it or not, Apple maintains control, and will continue to maintain control. Anything that removes control will be rejected. Don't like it, move to another platform.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
If you understand how Opera Mini works and why Apple bans other browsers (hint: it is not because they retrieve and display web pages) you would not find this surprising at all.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I have Opera Mini installed on my Android phone, and I believe it is no threat to the Safari browser, as it does not support multi-touch and is generally not as sophisticated. It is very useful when only a slow network connection is available; however, I feel that if that is not the case, Safari will stay superior.
It would be a freaking miracle if Opera Mobile (the complete Opera browser, that exists for ALL smartphones but Apple's) would be accepted on the iPhone.
But indeed, Opera didn't even try to propose it. They dared propose a simple remote viewer, Opera Mini.
Contrary for instance to my Nokia N97mini which features the original Nokia browser and let me replace it with Opera Mobile, the iPhone is probably the only platform where no other browser will be allowed (nor even proposed).
So, yes, some call it freaking...
Herve S.
2008:
http://www.unwiredview.com/2008/10/30/opera-mini-for-iphone-rejected-by-apple-from-app-store/
Now you know more.
OK, so instead of Opera being the first alternative browser on the platform, you choose to define "alternative browser" in such a way that the platform already has a plethora of "alternative browsers", turning freedom of choice into a game of semantics. What's your point, apart from clouding the issue?
Someone from Apple is getting fired for mistaking an internal April fools joke in Apple, and actually approving opera.
Actually I believe it will be Opera Maxi for the iPad.
I just tried it and it's pretty clear why Apple approved it. Opera Mini is so vastly inferior to the built in safari that all of the non-slashdotites who try it will instantly lose any desire they had for alternative browsers.
Even the nytimes site that is in the default bookmarks is unreadable, and when you try to two-finger zoom in it moves you to some pre-set zoom level that's too far in.
I can't wait for the day when the *full* user experience of Internet Explorer finally comes to the iPhone :p
But if you actually follow the articles, you'll find the following: "The discussion has been raging about how Opera came to know that its software wasn’t going to be welcomed by Apple. In particular, iPhone fans wanted to know if the company submitted a fully working version of Opera to the iPhone App Store. So I went back to Mr. von Tetzchner for more details. He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an “internal project” of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple’s software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted. “We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license,” Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail message. In other words, they read the license and decided that Apple would not allow it without actually talking to Apple.
My father grew up experiencing the highly-controlled economy of the 1950s and 1960s Soviet Union. I just showed him this Slashdot submission, and he said the headline reminded him of those he would occasionally see in the local newspaper of the town he grew up in.
Whenever the government allowed somebody to get a vehicle (apparently a big deal in small towns in those days), there would be headlines like, "<person's name> has been approved for a <vehicle's name>."
The similarities shouldn't be surprising, I suppose. Apple basically does want to create a centrally-controlled economy around their platform, with them making all decisions for everyone using their platform.
I take the point - but for antitrust issues to apply, Apple would have to have a monopoly on phones
No, European antitrust legislation applies to any "activity that aims to prevent, restrict or distort competition". It is not necessary for a company to be in a monopoly position for those conditions to be true.
Equally, it could also be argued that Apple has a monopoly on iPhone app stores, in order to show that they could exert undue control over what should be a freely competitive market.
It's not a huge leap to conclude that if Apple exploits their position as owner of the iPhone OS and app store to disadvantage their competitors who want to release iPhone apps, then those competitors are going to cry foul.
And why on Earth would anyone devote hundreds of hours of their time (and money) to developing a product that, according to the developer ToS, would never, ever be approved?
The core APIs required to do all this are all right there in OS X and are documented - other plugin makers can do it just fine (and On2 even did it with Flash itself with their in-program flash player for checking the flash video encodes you just made).
This is not Apple's fault - their documentation is extensive.
Quicktime itself does not hardware accelerate H.264 (except on the 9400M GPU) in OS X and it plays things just fine at low CPU load. This is not about hardware acceleration or access to private APIs, its just crappy code.
I'm
just
happy
to
have
a
browser
that
renders
Slashdot
comments
properly.