The Opera Mobile Store, the fifth-largest mobile app store in the world, announced that it has reached a new milestone of 105 million monthly visitors at the end of Q4 2013.
As the world’s largest cross-platform app store, the Opera claims that its Mobile Store saw exponential growth in its user base over the 12 last months, increasing by 172% since the close of 2012. The Opera Mobile Store currently offers more than 200,000 mobile apps and games across most mobile platforms, including Android, Java, BlackBerry, Symbian and iOS.
Some other big milestones for the Opera Mobile Store in 2013 were as follows:
- The top-three countries based on the number of Opera Mobile Store users were India, the United States (jumping five positions up to no. 2) and Indonesia, showing not only the Opera Mobile Store’s popularity in Southeast Asia, but also growth in the United States.
- The number of page views and downloads in the Opera Mobile Store each grew 250% year over year. In 2013, the Opera Mobile Store acquired 1.7 times more new users than in 2012. Also, the visit-to-downloads ratio increased 20%. The improved visits-to-downloads ratio shows that users are spending more time finding and downloading more content.
- Android users showed strong growth during 2013, nearly reaching the level of Java-based downloads. Android app downloads are currently 42.7% of total downloads – up 16.8% in one year.
- The Opera Mobile Store forged several strong partnership agreements with mobile carriers in Eastern Europe. MTS Belarus and MTS Ukraine launched co-branded app stores with Opera for their combined user base of 28 million.
- The Opera Mobile Store signed a cross-app store publishing partnership with Yandex, the 4th-largest search engine worldwide and leading search engine in Eastern Europe. This partnership will allow apps in the Opera Mobile Store also to be available for download in the Yandex app store and vice versa.
“The Opera Mobile Store was launched in September 2011, based on the technology from the acquisition of Handster. In just over two years, the Opera Mobile Store has shown strong growth – from 18 million monthly visitors to 100 million, and has seen a fivefold increase in the number of apps offered” says Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. “The compression technology in Opera’s browsers, combined with the broad portfolio of apps in the Opera Mobile Store across many different platforms, have resulted in massive adoption of the store worldwide.”
Users can access the Opera Mobile Store via Opera’s flagship Opera Mini, Mobile Classic and Opera for Android mobile browsers. The store is said to have 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 visiting apps.opera.com on their phones.
