

19 days later, Apple still hasn't approved the Opera Mini app - mcantelon
http://my.opera.com/community/countup/?

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JeffJenkins
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if their plan was to get rejected and then
sue Apple (in Europe, where they would stand some chance at winning).

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stricken
Sue them for what?

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jrockway
Anticompetitive actions? Microsoft got in trouble for _bundling_ IE. Why
wouldn't Apple get in trouble for actively prohibiting competing browsers?

This is Europe, after all, not the US. The average consumer actually has some
rights over there. (In the US, we basically have "if it blows up and ruins
your face, Apple has to buy you a band-aid" and "you have the right to not buy
it".)

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Anechoic
_Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE. Why wouldn't Apple get in trouble
for actively prohibiting competing browsers?_

Microsoft got in trouble for using IE to strengthen their Windows monopoly -
it wasn't too long ago that if you want to online banking, etc, you _had_ to
use IE and ActiveX which meant you had to use Windows.

Apple has no such monopoly, even in the smartphone space where Finland's Nokia
has several times the marketshare of the iPhone.

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halo
I'm not sure how you can be so confident that the regulators will conclude
that Apple doesn't have a monopoly if investigated by regulators.

This can be far from obvious. In the Microsoft case, it was decided that the
operating system market is distinct from the web browser market. This
conclusion is decidedly non-intuitive, since what does and does not make up a
modern operating system is largely arbitrary, as anyone who has used a modular
system knows.

What's to stop the EC deciding that the iTunes Store is distinct from the
phone and MP3 player market? To me, it seems that the distinction between
hardware and retail being different markets is much more clear than the line
between where an OS ends and where software starts.

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MWinther
Isn't it intuitive that browsers, which for the most part are available for
several different operating systems, is a separate market from the operating
system itself? Seem like two different markets to me. Of course, on the iPhone
there is so far no browser market, but that would be the exception, no?

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halo
X.Org is available on several different operating systems too, but I assume
you don't think that Microsoft should have been prevented from shipping a GUI
with their OS.

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dannyr
I have developer friends who have submitted their apps on the App Store and
had it approved within a week.

It may be just because this is a way more complicated app or Apple is set to
reject it but just trying to figure out how to defend themselves against
whatever outrage that will happen.

I wonder how much resources (time and money) Opera spent on this. This is why
I think the App Store is such a risky bet if your app takes months to make or
it's something that has never been done before.

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c1sc0
I've had an (iPad) app approved in hours & then an iPad update fixing critical
bugs for the same app blocked for one week. It's still a crapshoot. If you go
into 'extended review', I suggest retracting the binary & submitting again,
hoping that you get a different reviewer. Joy!

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frou_dh
Even if you installed this Opera app, you'd still be seeing Safari/Webkit a
lot - since, unlike a standard computer, you won't be able to set a new
default browser.

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nnash
I thought they rejected apps that replicated core functionality of the native
apps a la google voice.

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mbrubeck
And yet there are plenty of third-party browsers in the app store...

(The major difference is that the browsers in the store today use the included
WebKit, while Opera Mini has its own rendering engine that relies on Opera's
server-side proxy.)

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rimantas
Well, here on HN I often hear that open is better and wins ;)

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niravs
I highly doubt this will be approved. There is no way Apple is letting a third
party come and play on their turf in the mobile browser market. Not to mention
this would mean Apple would not have full control of who the default search
provider is.

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csallen
Users having to download Opera Mini from the App Store is hardly competition
for the phone's _default_ search provider.

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niravs
What if Opera gains significant share on the iPhone? Now Apple doesn't have as
much leverage against Google.

That's really what I meant to say.

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houseabsolute
Interesting preview video on that site. I'm amazed that with Safari to copy
from they still made the mistake of keeping a bar at the top with the current
page to waste my precious screen real estate.

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makecheck
A web browser is probably one of the more complicated apps you could write,
though. If Apple insists on thoroughly examining what an app is doing, this
ought to take awhile.

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ryanhuff
Unfortunately for Opera, some of what their "browser" does is within their own
servers. So, Apple can never have complete visibility into what the
application (service) does.

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wvenable
Aren't a huge number of apps just like that. What does a twitter app do except
communicate with a server outside their control? Even the Google maps
application is just a viewer for some server-side data.

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ryanhuff
The difference is that a huge portion of the smarts that goes into rendering
the page happens off-device. Opera isn't a typical web browser. My
understanding is that its more like webex or something that pushes most of the
work to a server.

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wvenable
That's absolutely true, I just wonder where Apple would draw the line. How
much server-side processing is too much?

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elai
There are plenty of apps that are just a bunch of web views on tabs. Thats
pretty much %100 server side processing ;)

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lukev
I think this might be dead in the water to begin with. Apples new TOS state
that their new OS is only allowed to run C/C++/Objective C and _Javascript as
interpreted by Safari_.

So it would seem that Opera won't be allowed to interpret Javascript, making
it pretty useless as a general purpose browser.

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Naga
But then again, wouldn't that prevent PHP from being run as well, since it is
server-side?

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lukev
No... server side would be fine. But there's no way Opera could be running
page Javascript on the server. Javascript is too tightly integrated with the
browser. For example, you can't implement a page element "hover" event via
server-side code.

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JeremyBanks
This isn't related to the grandparent's post but on other platforms Opera Mini
does only support a limited amount of Javascript and it runs on their servers.

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#JavaScript_support>:

 _Opera Mini has limited support for JavaScript. Before the page is sent to
the mobile device, its onLoad events are fired and all scripts are allowed a
maximum of two seconds to execute. The setInterval and setTimeout functions
are disabled, so scripts designed to wait a certain amount of time before
executing will not execute at all. After the scripts have finished or the
timeout is reached, all scripts are stopped and the page is compressed and
sent to the mobile device. Once on the device, only a handful of events are
allowed to trigger scripts: onUnload, onSubmit, onChange, onClick_

~~~
lukev
Well! I wasn't aware of that. So it sounds like the TOS issue is not a problem
for them.

Unfortunately, it also means it's a completely crippled browser. Why anyone
would WANT to use it instead of something fully functional (like Safari) is
beyond me. The days of squinting at tiny mobile versions of websites on a 2x1
cell phone screen are behind us, and good riddance. It would appear that Opera
Mini is already obsolete on the iPhone due to its very architecture.

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akmiller
Obviously you haven't used it! It is definitely meant for content consumption,
not general interactivity with more complex web apps. What it does it does
very well and does it blazingly fast!

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shadowz
Is there an option to guess never?

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petercooper
Bear in mind that it took weeks for Spotify to be approved too, and they are a
significant competitor to Apple's music store.

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hkuo
Is this supposed to be a shocker? My submitted prediction is still 66 days
out, even though I think an answer of never is still very likely. Though I'm
just betting on Opera cutting features to get an approved app.

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Pistos2
That very page has been updated, saying Opera Mini has been approved.

"Status update: Opera Mini for iPhone was officially approved by Apple on
April 12 at 20:56:00 UTC"

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jister
There were complaints before that approval of apps seemed forever so that
might be one of the reasons but considering they made revisions to their OS
policy then they might not approve it at all.

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metamemetics
in related news, the newest version of opera desktop definitely took a note
from chrome and is pretty minimal\awesome.

