UPDATE:
The New York Times gets clarification from Opera (via Daring Fireball):
“We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license,” to Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail.
Turns out it was an internal project.
ORIGINAL POST:
So we, along with half the interwebs, picked up a paraphrased comment by Opera’s president that pretty much indicated Apple had rejected popular mobile browser Opera Mini from the App Store.
Well, John Gruber over at Daring Fireball did some digging and found out that it just ain’t so:
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, they haven’t even submitted it to Apple, let alone had it be rejected.
To no one’s surprise, but perhaps to a few’s disppointment, Apple may have denied entry to the iTunes App Store to Opera Mini. Says the New York Times (via Daring Fireball):
Mr. von Tetzchner said 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.
Opera doesn’t state what the terms of rejection were, be it “duplicative functionality” like PodCaster, they dared touch Steve Jobs’ sacred dock, or whether they were trying to parse JavaScript against the terms of the SDK. Whatever the reason, however, there remains uncertainty for developers and a deafening lack of justification from Apple. (Perhaps even more ironic, given Valley Wag’s assertion that Opera was once considered by Apple to be the iPhone browser!)
For those not familiar with Opera Mini, on the Windows Mobile, Palm, and even Blackberry platforms that have been woefully under-served by the likes of Blazer and Pocket IE, Opera Mini has become one of the first things installed in a desperate attempt to get at least something closer to the actual internet on their devices (though this is changing with the likes of Android, and devices such as the Blackberry Thunder). Opera has also found a niche in embedded systems (e.g. video game platforms).
However, Opera Mini pre-crunching all data on their own servers before shipping it to handsets sets off a “Gibsonian response” in my central security core, so while it wouldn’t appeal to me on the iPhone, I would prefer to reject it myself rather than have Apple do so perfunctorily on my behalf.
What about you? Anyone seriously bummed there won’t be Opera for the iPhone any time soon?
Opera, the admirable yet often un-admired cross-platform web browser alternative to Internet Explorer on the PC, Safari on the Mac, and Firefox pretty much everywhere, was considered by Apple to be the original baked-in surfing standard for the iPhone?
Huhbuwha?
That’s pretty much what we thought too, though Valleywag stands behind the story:
Before the first iPhone was released, Apple wanted Opera to build the browser for the iPhone, says a source. Negotiations dragged on for six months, the sticking point being exclusivity — Apple wanted it, but Opera was unwilling to commit, seeing a larger market for licensing its proprietary software to multiple handset manufacturers.
Valleywag says, if true, Opera made a huge miscalculation, give the iPhone’s unprecedented mobile browsing market share. We say… shenanigans! Unless we’re talking history so ancient Bill Gates was floating overhead at Macworld announcing IE as the default Apple browser, this just doesn’t seem logical, reasonable, or rational.
As any longtime reader of this site knows, the iPhone started life as a tablet concept device called… (wait for it…) Safari Pad. Pretty big clue right there in the name as to what browser Apple was leaning towards, wouldn’t you say? (We would).
Likewise, Apple was willing to throw away devote resources to a Windows version of Safari, never mind Steve Jobs’ near totalitarian approach to keeping things in the Apple ecosystem (after having been burned one to many times by licensed technology).
Stranger bedfellows have tech made (see IE on Mac, above) but we’re filing this one under EPIC NO! for now…
