Opera Mobile store passes 100 million users

MUMBAI, INDIA: The Opera Mobile Store, the fifth-largest mobile app store in the world, today 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 Mobile Store saw exponential growth in its user base over the 12 last months, increasing by 172 per cent 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.

By the end of 2013, the app store also got a completely redesigned storefront, generating record-breaking conversion rates of visitors who ended up downloading and using apps.

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 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.

* Android users showed strong growth during 2013, nearly reaching the level of Java-based downloads. Android app downloads are currently 42.7 per cent of total downloads - up 16.8 per cent in one year.

* The number of page views and downloads in the Opera Mobile Store each grew 250 per cent 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 per cent. The improved visits-to-downloads ratio shows that users are spending more time finding and downloading more content.

"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," added Boilesen.