Opera launches mobile app store

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 09 March 2011 09:43

Your IT - Mobility

Opera Software, developer of the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers for cellphones, has launched a mobile app store, mobilestore.opera.com, built and delivered through a strategic partnership with white label app marketplace operator, Appia.

The Opera Mobile Store offers both free and paid applications for "virtually any mobile platform and device," according to Opera, and is available to users of Opera and any other mobile browsers, "on all popular mobile phone platforms in more than 200 countries."

According to Opera, its mobile store "uses Appia's storefront commerce technology and leverages a wide catalogue of applications for phones with Java, Symbian, BlackBerry and Android operating systems. The storefront experience is customised to each user's phone, providing a tailored catalogue based on the phone's operating system, local language and currency."

Opera Software has also launched the Opera Publisher Portal that enables developer to get their applications onto the Opera Mobile Store.

Opera claims that, in its pre-launch state, the store attracted more than 15 million users in February, from 200 countries, achieving more than 700,000 downloads per day, making it one of the world's top 10 mobile application stores.

Appia claims to operate the world's largest open app marketplace and white label storefront platform, providing the app storefronts for more than 40 partners reaching more than 200 million mobile subscribers in 200 countries. Customers include four of the world's top five handset manufacturers, three of the top four mobile operators in the US and three of the top ten mobile operators. The company claims to have a catalogue of over 140,000 paid and free apps from more than 30,000 application developers.