Opera Mobile Store triples the number of apps, monthly visitors grow 63 percent

Cross-platform mobile app store now serves 140,000 apps to 75M monthly visitors

San Mateo, Calif. - October 24, 2013 - The Opera Mobile Store, the fifth-largest mobile app store in the world, today announced that it has tripled the size of the store in the last 12 months, currently offering more than 140,000 apps. The Opera Mobile Store provides more than 75 million monthly visitors, an increase of 63%, with mobile apps and games across most platforms, including Android, Java, BlackBerry, Symbian and iOS.

Usage is also up — the number of daily visitors to the Opera Mobile Store has grown from 1 million to 2.6 million in the past year. Of special note, the United States jumped five positions to take second place in terms of Opera Mobile Store visitors since last year. India remains no. 1, while Indonesia has moved to no. 3, continuing to reflect the Opera Mobile Store’s strength and popularity in Southeast Asia.

Over the first half of 2013, the Opera Mobile Store team introduced several major changes, improving the store platform with useful features for customers, developers and advertisers, resulting in significant success in traffic-to-downloads conversion. This includes the following:

• The redesigned Opera Mobile Store's interface for Android devices, featuring the Discover service on the Opera for Android browser, has improved the visitor-to-download ratio by 20%. The Discover service on Opera for Android is a curated list of top websites and content available for selected countries.
• The Opera Mobile Store is also now available for the customers of several major mobile carriers in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Brazil, allowing mobile users to pay for apps right from their mobile account.
• The Opera Payment Exchange (OPX)-powered Opera Mobile Store has been launched in India, the USA, the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa. Earlier, users could pay for paid apps using credit cards but with OPX integration, users can now pay for apps using carrier billing. This has significantly simplified the payment process for apps and improved visit-to-purchase conversion in those countries.

Other trends in usage numbers for the Opera Mobile Store are also clear.

Upcoming markets such as India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia continue to grow. By the end of September 2013, their cumulative download share represented 35% of the Opera Mobile Store’s global downloads.

The biggest market share for mobile apps in these countries still belongs to the low-cost, J2ME-powered mobile devices, with over 49% of the total downloads. These statistics confirm that Android-powered smartphones are slower in penetrating developing countries.

Nevertheless, Android is showing growth in the above-mentioned countries. Android’s market share in these four countries has grown from 11% in September 2012 to 32% in September 2013. Concurrently, the popularity of Java apps in these countries has decreased by 29%, falling from 78% to 49%.

Across all countries, total downloads of Android apps from the Opera Mobile Store grew 18.5% to 38.4% of total app downloads in a year, Java apps downloads have decreased from 67.8% to 43.9%, Symbian has gone from 10.3% to 9.9% and Windows Mobile has shifted from 1.9% to 0.4%. Gaming apps based on the recently-introduced HTML5 online-gaming platform has had 2.6% of downloads on the Opera Mobile Store.

The top-10 downloaded apps to date in the Opera Mobile Store are as follows (by number of monthly downloads):

1.  Facebook app by Facebook (Java)
2. TubeMate YouTube Downloader by Devian Studio (Android)
3.  Download Manager for Android by FDDM
4. Chat for Facebook PRO by Mail-Bit LTD (multi-platform)
5. NewsHunt by Eterno Infotech (Java)
6. Frim by Ardetiel Services Limited (multi-platform)
7.  Angry Birds Rio by Rovio Entertainment Ltd (Android)
8.  eBuddy Messenger by eBuddy (multi-platform)
9. WeChat by Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Company Limited (multi-platform)
10.  Overdrive by Zapak.com (multi-platform)

Users can access the Opera Mobile Store via Opera's flagship Opera Mini, Mobile Classic and Opera for Android mobile browsers and has been proven as an effective mobile-content distribution platform in several of the world's fastest-growing mobile markets, including India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa. Users can also access the Opera Mobile Store by browsing to apps.opera.com on their phones.

Besides the reach of the Opera Mobile Store distribution platform, Opera offers marketing and distribution options that extend beyond the mobile store to reach the more than 260 million users of Opera's mobile browsers worldwide.