App Rejections

Finally (finally!) we can use the world’s best web-browser for mobile-phones – and it’s free. After years of “will they / won’t they”, Opera Mini is now available for iPhone:

“Opera Mini has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store.”

What’s changed? Maybe the storm of press attention when Opera implied it was only Apple’s policies that were keeping Opera off the iPhone.

Maybe … maybe it’s that Opera *Mini* (the actual version launched) is a lot more than just a web browser. It uses proprietary servers to speed up the overall web-browsing experience (if you’re interested in the details, go look at the Opera site, or read the many blogs about the techniques they’re using).

There’s a long history to this story… It was almost two years ago that Opera first claimed they’d ported to iPhone – but that Apple wouldn’t allow them to distribute it. Or, as it later transpired, the company was careless, and the journalist was imprecise: they’d ported, but hadn’t given Apple the chance to reject them.

(and there was plenty of precedent for such a rejection – c.f. one contemporary example covered by the NYT itself)

At the time, it was an example of the potentially self-defeating long-term effects of Apple’s strategies. Their refusal to be honest and open about approvals led to the world’s best mobile browser being available on every mobile … except iPhone. Strategies intended to increase app-quality were having the opposite effect.

…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.

Personally, I’m just glad it’s finally here!