[tweetmeme]Let’s back up here a minute. Apple has earned its reputation as the evil gatekeeper of the App Store. You know, rejects apps for no reason, keeps competition at bay, and more or less acts like a total jerk to developers. And I was fine with that—it gave us something to whine about.

So here comes Opera, who decide that their desktop market share is going nowhere (after so many years, I might add), thinking, “How about we poke around on the iPhone. It is, the device everyone’s talking about, so if we get there before IE and firefox, we might just stand a chance.” Opera makes the application abiding by all the App Store rules, and submits it to Apple expecting a rejection. So, they publicise their act, gain everyone’s support (for god knows what reason), add a counter to their site for every day Apple didn’t approve the app; lo and behold, the app is in the App Store!

I regret that I sent out a tweet from the @smokingapples twitter account. I caved in. It looked like a popular cool thing to tweet about at the time, and as soon as it was approved, I sent out a tweet (along with a cool video with nice shallow depth of field; I’m a sucker for low depth of field). I wish deleting that tweet could make me feel better, but I won’t, if only to remind myself how pathetic an act it was.

The marketing was so solid, the social reaction took the browser to occupy the top downloaded app on every iTunes store. It appeared as if this was the thing everyone was waiting for. Turns out, it’s just a free app that everyone was curious as to what the fuss was all about.

I’ll say it; you know it. Opera mini is a turd. It’s an ugly piece of crap, that’s not going to last a second longer on my home screen. You would think that a company which against all odds wants to make it as the first alternative browser on the iPhone, would at least look like something usable.

They start with the completely non-standard UI. The tab bar is different. There’s a hideous red bar right below the status bar. Even the copy paste bubbles are weird and kludgy. Almost every bit of UI in this app begs to be on the Android platform, and somehow it found its way into the App Store. Riccardo Mori elegantly points out the obvious.

Now don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of hideous applications on the App Store. But if you’re making such a high profile app, that could potentially be downloaded by every iPhone enthusiast, and you want to show an example of how there can be a decent alternative to mobile Safari, this is not the kind of crap you put out.

Looks aside, the app is even worse in terms of functionality. The page preview looks like something from PageMaker™, while it’s scrolling reminds you of what Twitterrific was when it first showed up on the App Store. You cannot run javascript web application on it, and neither can it play YouTube videos. Most sites appear totally fucked up—please don’t look at SA on this browser—and I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want this instead of mobile Safari.

Oh wait, it’s got speed. Yeah that’s right speed. On an edge network, sites load faster than mobile Safari. That’s the one thing. Wifi (and I suppose 3G) speed differences would hardly warrant the need for such a crappy internet experience. The experience is that of using a Nokia phone in 2005 (or even 2010 for that matter), and it’s not something I’d enjoy on a regular basis; it’s not something I’d enjoy rarely, even.

But, at the end of the day, it all makes sense for Apple. Apple let in a Opera Mini and looked like a hero (and Opera a loser for whining about it before hand). More importantly, they made Mobile Safari look so much more attractive, and desirable. No one would even want to think about wanting Firefox now. I think the Walt Mosspuppet’s video review pretty much sums it up. [Warning: Contains profanity]