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Opera Mini Not Rejected From iPhone (Yet)
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Nov 01, 2008 09:41 PM
from the fat-lady-sings dept.
from the fat-lady-sings dept.
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."
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narramissic writes "The iPhone crowd is still dominated by affluent males between the ages of 18 and 35, but in a series of surveys ending in August, ComScore found that iPhone purchases grew fastest among people with annual household incomes between $25,000 and $50,000. The growth rate in this group was 48 percent, compared with just 16 percent among people with incomes above $100,000. And the down economy isn't going to turn this trend around, says ComScore Mobile analyst Jen Wu. 'I don't see there's going to be much of a slowdown, just because wireless devices are so much more of a necessity than they used to be,' Wu said."
In other iPhone news, an anonymous reader points out a NYTimes story about the rise in car-related applications and uses for the iPhone, which points out that programmers are just beginning to "appreciate just what can be done with an iPhone and other advanced cellphones that know where they are and just how quickly they are going someplace else." Another iPhone story mentions 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."
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Why... (Score:3)
...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.
Re:Why... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
I know little about Opera, but:
it works like this: You request a URL in Opera Mini. Opera Mini makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. Operaâ(TM)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 â" Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client. Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective â" itâ(TM)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.
Opera Mini is probably a Java app, so it can run on the most number of phones. Porting a JVM that only needs to support a few select bits is vastly easier than porting a full-blown rendering engine from c/cpp to obj c.
Parent
Re:Why... (Score:5, Informative)
See, that's also confusing. When you have a fully featured browser already in the phone, why compete with a substandard browser that's incapable of surfing anything more than static sites?
I can clearly see that you've never used Opera Mini. I've used Opera Mini to read and post on Slashdot. It works just fine.
Parent
Re:Why... (Score:4, Interesting)
See, that's also confusing. When you have a fully featured browser already in the phone, why compete with a substandard browser that's incapable of surfing anything more than static sites?
Are you just making things up as you go along, or..?
Opera Mini supports a great deal of JavaScript / "AJAX" functionality (I frequently use it to access various Google services, including the full Gmail), and for many users might prove more favorable than the iPhone Safari due to its proxy/caching features.
If Apple still refuses Opera's app in native (non-JVM) form, this can't be called anything other than anti-competitive.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's just it. Safari is a great browser, and it is probably the best mobile browser in terms of usability, but it's not the best browser in terms of capability. If the iPhone platform was more open, Opera could port their browsers over, and people who wanted to use features that Safari for a number of reasons (some of which are good) don't support, like Java and Flash, could just use those browsers instead.
I don't blame Apple right now for not supporting Java and Flash in Safari, because with a scalab
Re:Why... (Score:4, Informative)
Opera Mini is faster because it gets highly compressed data. It's also a lot cheaper if you pay per MB.
Nope. Opera Mini actually has a place on the iPhone because it offers something truly unique with its compression. That makes it cheaper and faster than Safari for a lot of people. And besides, Opera Mini was ported to C/C++ more than a year ago, and considering that Opera Software makes a living porting browsers, there's no reason to doubt that it was ported.
Parent
Re:Why... (Score:4, Interesting)
Having read the article in greater depth, I see that the author has made a few incorrect assumptions. One of them appears to be that if it's not Opera Mini, it is therefore Opera JavaME. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Not only does Opera have their Opera Mobile [wikipedia.org] product that is designed to run on a variety of non-Java smartphones, but they also have products like the Wii Internet Channel [wikipedia.org]. The Internet Channel is a stripped down version of the desktop browser running in an environment that's not too dissimilar to the iPhone.
So take the information in the article with a large grain of salt.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Correction to myself. I misunderstood what the author was saying. He was saying that Opera Mini is a JavaME browser, not that anything other than Opera Mini is a JavaME browser. My mistake.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The best thing i can come up with would be the duplication factor.
People might waste bandwidth downloading podcasts in podcaster, the forthcoming 2.2 firmware that allows podcast downloads, and then also on the itunes system they manage the thing with.
Thats three downloads the podcast host sees (and therefor also the advertiser) but only one actual listener.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Even if you view this as anti-competitive, it's perfectly ok for Apple to be anti-competitive unless they have a monopoly in the relevant market (ie: phones).
They don't, so it's fine. Microsoft did, so it was a problem.
Hope that clears things up...
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Opera / VLC provides a different user experience than Safari / iTunes.
And Apple cares about apps attempting to allow the user to change their usage experience.
This isn't about what the end user wants, it's about what Apple wants.
If VLC users have to get used to iTunes, and Opera users have to get used to Safari to use the iPhone...
They will be more likely to get rid of their PCs, get Macs, get iPods, and buy all their music from the iTunes store.
Apple is selling a package, and they want all their users to buy into that package.
Anyone pushing a different media player, browser, or alternative to a base Apple product (even a free Apple product) is a threat to the Apple vision and... sales in the future.
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The point of the article is that we don't know whether Opera will be accepted or not. I'm inclined to think that Opera will be accepted (or at least the concept has been previously approved by Apple), so this is probably a pointless conversation.
What I mean is, I hope the Opera people aren't stupid enough to put resources toward developing an iPhone version of their browser without getting pre-approval from Apple that such a thing would be accepted. To my knowledge, nobody has yet tried to submit a browser to Apple, so it seems premature to thrown Apple under the bus until we really have a clue.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If current trends continue then more and more developers will develop apps to run on a browser instead of directly on the Operating System.
If Apple don't ban a browser like Opera or Chrome, then opera or google could keep adding features to their browsers until any app could be developed to run within the browser thereby bypassing the need to get "permission" to run apps on the phone through the app store.
To ensure they can keep making money from the app store and maintain their agreements with the phone co
Vapor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Vapor (Score:5, Insightful)
if it's FUD it's all based on Apple's already accrued bad reputation.
first, they lock down the iPhone and prevent 3rd-party apps from being run on it. then when they finally open it up they require all applications to be approved by them and distributed through the App Store. then they reject 3rd-party applications that might compete with their own software. and finally, then they make all developers sign an NDA that prevents developers from speaking about App Store rejections.
but if you want to assume that this is all an elaborate Opera PR stunt designed to spread FUD about Apple then go right on ahead. it's not like this so-called FUD isn't based on what people already think about Apple as a result of their own recent actions.
Parent
Anti-Competitive Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anti-Competitive Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
OK. I thought this was about Opera Mini, but if it's Fair Play, boookay.
AFAIR, it wasn't the EU that busted them, it was one country that tried - and failed as the case was without foundation.
I guess as an iPod nano user - that doesn't direct connect via wifi like an iPod Touch or iPhone - I'm not on the right wavelength. To answer your question, I can copy Fair Play protected music from my computer iTunes to my iPod, but not other players.
The way I get around this is to avoid all Fair Play music. Enough codecs work just peachy on an iPod that I needed add DRM to the fray.
I've posted many times from the fossil record that Apple is clearly on the record recommending people to challenge the record companies to end DRM once and for all. I'll leave you to google that for yourself. As there is a clear historical record of Apple denouncing DRM and MS doing the opposite, my mind would boggle at the idea that MS is far less restrictive were it not so late and this not a sandwich break during the director's cut of Blade Runner on TV tonight.
You might want to research your facts. Your mind might become less boggled.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks - and by the way, I admitted my ignorance, the clueless tag was not required.
So, to smarten up over here, I went over to Apple and started to apply as an iPhone developer. However, as I could not in honesty list my company as being part of all that, and not being an out and out liar, I couldn't complete the free developer application. Neither did I want to invent one to go to all that trouble and end up with an NDA problem.
So, I can't access the free SDK nor its terms and conditions that way. Howe
Not Allowed (Score:3, Informative)
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.
He never said it was "rejected" ! ! ! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's not about Apple being silly (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Granted, he did ask that his post be modded troll, but it really isn't. Perhaps he picked a poor example. Here's another [slashdot.org].
From the summary:
The folks at O'Reilly Media aren't immune, so they set out to discover just what is it about iPhones that makes them such bad RF citizens.
Cute. Lots of phones are 'bad RF citizens', but gee, this sounds like the iPhone is special in this regard, right?
More from the summary:
The iPhones aren't the only bad apples in the cell phone basket and there's not much you can do about the problem.
So... lots of cell phones create RF interference in some devices. Did that make article make it to Slashdot because of the interesting topic of RF interferrence, or did the line about the iPhone not being a good RF citizen cause it to be approved? Did both of the Opera stories make it without the words "Apple rejected..."?
It's fashionable to smack Apple around, but seriously, it's not like the AC was wrong.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hmm... this would be the same Gruber who wrote that the App Store's exclusion of applications which "compete with" Apple's own offerings is "seriously wrong [daringfireball.net]"? The one who said (same link) that "[i]f this is truly Apple's policy, it's a disaster for the platform"? The same Gruber who said, of Apple's policies, "they shouldn't be doing this [daringfireball.net]"? The same Gruber who said of Apple's inscrutable rejections of