Opera plays chicken with Apple iPhone police
Interpret this, cultkeepers
Opera's Jesus Phone play is more clever than you think.
Yesterday, the Norwegian browser makers let it be known that at next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, they will publicly unveil an iPhone incarnation of their Opera Mini mobile browser. The general assumption is that Steve Jobs and cult won't actually let the thing onto their handheld status symbol - and that may be the case - but the Norwegians have at least ensured that if the Apple App Store police do reject the browser, they'll have to dig mighty deep into their bag of doublespeak.
As it stands, Apple does allow third-party browsers into the iPhone App Store - but only if they use the same WebKit rendering engine as its own Safari iPhone browser. The App Store police have been approving such browsers for about a year.
But the Jesus Phone isn't a place where you can run a serious Safari competitor. There's no Opera, Firefox, Chrome, or, well, Internet Explorer. Unless they use Apple's APIs or interpreters, third-party iPhone applications are barred from executing their own code .
"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise," reads the terms and conditions attached to Apple's iPhone SDK. "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built in interpreter(s)."
These two famous sentences also bar Adobe Flash and Java from the Jesus Phone - not to mention the imminent Apple iPad.
With these draconian conditions in place, Mozilla won't even attempt a browser for the iPhone. " Mozilla director of community development Asa Dotzler tells The Reg that the open source outfit has no interest in taking Firefox where "it's not wanted." And though Opera has admitted to prototyping an iPhone version of Opera Mini in the past, it never actually submitted the browser to the iPhone App Store.
Opera finds Jesus
In fact, it still hasn't submitted the browser to the App Store. And chief development officer Christen Krogh tells The Reg that the company hasn't been in touch with Apple over the matter at all. Never mind that when we sat down with Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner in the fall, he seemed to hint that Apple talks were in the works.
But Opera has now completed a version of Opera Mini for the iPhone. And it will unveil the thing before submitting it to the App Store - an apparent effort to force Apple's hand. And force Apple's hand it will.
Yes, Opera Mini is normally a Java application. But the iPhone version runs natively - and it will not interpret code. Like existing incarnations of Opera Mini, the iPhone version taps into proxy servers that intercept and compress webpages before sending them down to the client. This speeds download times - making the browser ideal for slower web connections - but it also means that Mini doesn't run its own webcode.
"The proxy servers take down web content and transcode it into a compressed and static content format," says Krogh. "There is no code execution or any scripting language running on the client."
From where Opera is sitting, its new browser does not violate Apple's SDK. That's why the company has chosen to port Mini to the iPhone, and not its Opera Mobile browser. And that's why the company believes Apple will approve the thing.
"We're not being cheeky," Krogh says. "We think they will approve it. The way we read the requirements and regulations, it clearly falls within that category of applications that can be approved...and it really is a different thing than iPhone Safari. It saves bandwidth. It makes it possible to surf the web when you're roaming on a network outside your native geography. And it's faster."
Why hasn't the company tried this in the past? "We figured we would synchronize the delivery of Opera Mini on the iPhone platform with the next generation of Opera Mini and Opera Mobile [on other platforms]," Krogh says. "Right around this time, we will be releasing Opera Mobile 10 on a number platforms and we're releasing Opera Mini 5 for J2ME, BREW, and other platforms."
OK. Fine. Mini 4 was released in November 2007, before Apple allowed third-party applications on the device. And Mini 5 offers a completely revamped user interface, including tabbed browsing and other new tools. But why didn't Opera submit the browser to Apple before unveiling the thing at the world's biggest mobile trade show?
Krogh chuckled before answering. "Every year at the show, we show our latest and greatest [browsers] to the world. And we want to do that again this year. And due to timing issues, this is the way it happened."
We still say the company is hoping to force Apple's hand.
And we back the attempt wholeheartedly.
Your play, cult police. ®
COMMENTS
@Precisely because Opera is a small fry
By what bizarre stretch of logic would any government get involved in this? Apple is quite free to use whatever criteria they desire, and apply it as arbitrarily as they like. They don't have to approve a single app if they don't want to. Granted they wouldn't have any developers left if they did that, but it's their store, their rules, and if you don't like it, there are a bazillion other phones out there that you can develop for instead. Gotta love the free market, eh?
Here is the point
One size does not fit all. If it did we'd all be using Internet Explorer on Windows.
If as you say mobile Safari is just fine why does Apple even care to block other browsers?
The reason of course is other browsers might support things like plugins, flash, Java etc. Things that people might very much like to run on their iPhone.
From a user perspective, the restrictions in the iPhone (and iPod Touch and iPad) are simply inexcusable.
Yes, JS
Opera Mini DOES support JS. It's handled by the server.
Eh?
"Meh, We're back in bizarro universe when arguably the most restricted and regulated platform in the wild is described as a "free market". Corporations attempt this rubbish all the time, but only the most retarded of sect dupes celebrate vendor lock-in to the extent appletards do."
I'm confused, Apple have <5% of the mobile phone market (compare that with around 40% for Nokia for example), they have a larger share of the personal media player market, but there are still numerous examples of competing products out there, and they have a small but growing share of the PC market.
How is this anything other than a free market? If you buy an iPhone there's nothing stopping you moving to another mobile phone once your contract terms have expired, and there's a multitude of other devices out there that not only allow you to make phone calls, but do just about everything else the iPhone does. (There's thousands of symbian apps out there if you go looking.)
"Nevermind, that's what we have that little thing called "anti-trust" legislation for - Apple *isn't* free to use "whatever criteria they desire", thank fuck, and personally I hope they get shat on from a great height. Go Opera!"
1. Apple is free at the moment, they have less than 5% of the market share, that is by no definition 'anti-competitive', if they ever do manage to achieve a dominant market position (remember MS had something like 80-90% of the computer market in the 90s) then I'm sure the anti-trust legislation will kick in.
2. Is this the same anti-trust legislation that was so effective in ending Microsoft's monopoly in the late 90s?
Can someone please explain where this ire comes from with the anti apple crowd? people seem vehemently upset that apple exercises control over it's platform, but don't seem to want to buy anything else? What is it the iPhone does so well and so uniquely that people who seem to hate apple with every fibre want to own one.
I didn't like some aspects of the iPhone when I last upgraded, that's why I have a phone from the dominant manufacturer in the marketplace; but I don't get upset about it. :)
If you don't like apples policies then don't buy their kit, if that represents the view of the majority of consumers they'll change it or wither away and die, but as it is they seem to be making a lot of cash (and, lets be fair, have a lot of happy customers) doing what they're doing.
Opera Mini is not crap
Opera Mini compresses pages up to 90%. That means faster and cheaper surfing.
