A few weeks ago, after the debut of the Opera App Store, app marketplace GetJar banned Opera’s mobile browsing app Opera Mini from its own mobile app marketplace. The reasoning: Opera’s App Store was available in the app and competes directly with GetJar’s marketplace. Today, it appears a truce has been made, as Opera Mini 6 is now backin the GetJar store.
GetJar remains committed to offering consumers the best possible content regardless of category, phone or platform, said Patrick Mork, CMO of GetJar. Opera Mini has been a great partner and one of our top apps for many years and our users will be happy to have a bigger and better version of Opera Mini back in our store.
It’s unclear how Opera and GetJar resolved their differences. When GetJar first banned Opera Mini from its app marketplace, Mork wrote that the company “spent many months negotiating with Opera to avoid this scenario and are disappointed that GetJar consumers will no longer have access to Opera Mini.” It appears that GetJar was blindsided by the fact that Opera opened up its own app store. A reader had suggested previously the possibility that GetJar bid for Opera’s inclusion of its app store in its mobile browser products but lost out to Appia, who is powering Opera’s app store.
The whole brouhaha does bring up an interesting point when it comes to competition and the flux of app marketplaces. At what point do competing app marketplaces and developers draw the line?
Well, all’s well that ends well.
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