Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

With Opera’s Web Store Launch, GetJar Pulls Norwegian Browser From Store

GetJar said on Wednesday that it had pulled Opera’s Web browsers off its digital shelves after the Norwegian company launched a rival mobile app store.

“This week we had to take a very drastic and unusual step at GetJar: to remove one of our longtime favorite apps,” Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Mork said in a soon-to-be-posted blog entry. Mork said the move is “nearly unprecedented” for the company, but necessary given the head-to-head competition.

“The simple problem is that Opera Mini decided to include a competing app store in its browser,” Mork said.

“Although we don’t have any issue with this in principle, in practice it means that consumers might start using this app store instead of visiting GetJar to get their favorite apps,” he added. “This robs GetJar of traffic and therefore of the advertising necessary to keep our service free for the more then 25 million consumers that use GetJar.”

The move comes just after Opera built an app store of its own into its mobile Web browser and highlights the growing competition in the third-party app store business.

The nixing is so fresh that a Google search still pulls up Opera on GetJar’s site. However, loading the page results in a message that says, “The application you have requested does not exist on GetJar. Sorry for inconvenience.”

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google