Opera Mini iPhone App Approved

techcrunch.com

18 points·jazzychad··6 comments

I have to wonder how this would have turned out if Apple wasn't already taking a lot of heat for the new developer agreement. Perhaps they are tempering their stance.

Perhaps they tried it and realized that it's not something that most users would want, and thus it stands little chance of hurting the platform.

Opera Mini is good for little more than simple content consumption on an extremely low-bandwidth diet (e.g. EDGE). For any sort of interactive, dynamic, or AJAX-y site or web app, it just doesn't cut it.

Case in point: http://twitpic.com/1f79bp

One thing it does really well is make everything one column of text- I think it's Mobile view in Settings. That is really nice for reading stuff. I'd still be using it if the Android Browser didn't already do the same thing.

I thought Apple wasn't accepting alternative browsers because they duplicated the functionality available in the native browser? In any case, I'd hope this browser has a Javascript interpreter built in -- in which case, it ought to violate the "no interpreters" clause in the developer agreement, right?

Surely this is a victory for iPhone users, but I've got to wonder what the guiding principles behind which apps get approved and which don't really are.

No, it doesn’t really support JS. The very minimal JS support it has is implemented in an interesting fashion as well.

In any case, the software on the phone never sees any javascript code, only the proxy does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini

I see. In light of this information, I retract my comment and upvote yours instead. :-)

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