
An interesting NYT Bits blog entry covers
Opera's mobile browser. Buried in the middle of the article is this quote: "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." It also talks about Opera on the Wii and browsers in cars. A good read.
My Take: But back to the iPhone. As tempted as I am to just shrug it off, since Apple is free to run its App Store any way it pleases, as an enthusiastic iPhone user, I think Apple is shooting itself in the foot here, as it is with all the "competitive" apps being rejected. Apple does stand to lose some Google revenue by letting people use other browsers, but they have much more to gain by unleashing the creativity of the developer community and giving them the freedom to improve or replace core iPhone functionality. Hopefully competition from Android forces them to wake up.
Member since:
2006-02-12
The answer to your question is simple. The people running Opera are as stupid as they've always been. Not only is it stated in the agreement that you CANNOT develop products that directly compete with Apple's software but there were quite a few articles about apps being stopped by Apple because of the same reason. My guess is that Opera is depending on people "illegally" installing their product not that the NDA is no longer there. Only this is probably the dumbest idea in the history of the software industry.