
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:
2007-09-05
Buck:
"Opera has actually made their engineers port their browser to the iPhone and all the while they knew perfectly it wouldn't be allowed in the app store"
Considering that Opera specializes in making it easy to port their browser to many different platforms, I doubt it was a big deal. Probably some hacking needed on their existing C based Opera Mini browser.
What makes you think it is clear what Apple will allow or not? Opera Mini has a completely different approach to browsing, so it doesn't compete directly with Safari.