Corvus Consulting

UPDATE

On April 12 Opera was approved for the App Store. I’m not sure if they should be happy to be in or insulted that they’re not threatening, but I’m glad to see it. Congrats, team Opera.

ORIGINAL POST

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Opera browser. I used it when it was among the only ad-supported online properties, paid for a license to support them, and evangelized it to coworkers and friends. It had mouse gestures, it was FAST, it could render as a small screen interface before anyone knew why they’d want to. Then I moved to a Mac, where Opera had yet to go, and never really went back when Opera did come to that platform.

Opera has done so much right but rarely receives the credit, much less market share, that it deserves. The company’s last major strategy shift was to position their browser as the premier choice for mobile use. But Apple, Google and RIM are eating up the mobile market and all three roll their own browsers. Opera is, once again, being left out in the cold but this time isn’t so quietly accepting of its fate.

Like watching a child star grow out of cuteness appeal and starting down a twisted road of attention-seeking stunts, we see Opera baiting an app rejection from Apple as a PR stunt. Anyone watching the App Store knows that apps duplicating the shipping functionality of the iPhone aren’t welcome. A count-up clock ticks away the minutes and hours until Apple acknowledges the Opera app with a predictable rejection or a policy-reversing approval, or casts it into the nether-regions of “Under Review” where it can lament with Google Voice.

Make Room for More Digits

Opera thinks they’ve done something smart: if they lose, they get attention and grassroots support. If they win, they get a spot onto one of the major mobile platforms with almost no competition. And if there’s no response, they’ll embarrass Apple, call out the naked emperor and ride a democratic tide of support. None of that will happen, though.

The app is almost certain to be rejected, as much for its duplicate functionality as for its questionable requirement of running all your traffic through Opera’s compression service. While that service delivers better download speeds, it also gives Opera an observation post for compiling all kinds of great stats on mobile web surfing as a lucrative revenue channel. Any rejection is unlikely to stir up more controversy than pulling Google Voice did, and that debacle didn’t seem to hurt the iPhone’s prospects beyond a handful of ‘well I never!’ blog posts.

It’s tempting to say Opera should look to Android, where it can try unconventional ideas without approval and even become embraced as an underdog before Chrome subsumes Android and turns Opera into a browser within a browser. But then there’s that thing about revenue, and competing with the brand loyalty and innovations of Firefox, which are also gunning for that platform.

No, Opera’s best window to fortune still seems to be licensing to device-makers. Blackberry users will wander the desert without a truly polished browser, and there are any number of Symbian refugees making undifferentiated handsets who could use the kind of browsing experience power-up that Opera could provide. And I hear this tablet thing might be big, so it might be smart to aim at being a great browser in that newly-opening space as well.

But I don’t think they’ll take that route nor any other worthwhile one, at least not while their minds are on trying to turn sour grapes into wine. I wish Opera well, but won’t be surprised if it turns up as ‘the nice guy turned angry’ on a season of The Surreal Life.