Opera Mini Not Rejected From iPhone (Yet) 202
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."
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.
Vapor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why... (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: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.
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: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.
Re:Why... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
This would mean that the it would violate the iPhone SDK Agreement as well - you can't have an interpreter that executes arbitrarily downloaded code other than what is already provided (being able to evaluate JavaScript using a UIWebView). Writing your own JavaScript interpreter would not be permitted and since the built in JavaScript interpreter can't be accessed except via the WebView (the javascriptcore.framework isn't exposed) you really can't make much of a web browser without violating some part of the SDK Agreement...
Re:Anti-Competitive Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
This would be the behaviour of which there is evidence? Sounds like plenty of questions to me.
Why? What exactly are they doing that is remotely close to being against the law?
Why?