Software maker Opera has been quietly amassing clout for its mobile store, as it announced today that the number of apps in the store has tripled over the past 12 months to reach more than 140,000 apps, while a total of 75 million visitors land on the store monthly.
The number of daily visitors now stands at 2.6 million, more than double the 1 million a year ago. The US jumped five places to take second place in terms of number of visitors, while India remains in the first position, with Indonesia taking third place.
As testament to how Opera appeals to emerging markets in particular, the company notes that Java platform-powered mobile devices (typically feature phones) still take up a large part of mobile app downloads in India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia, making up over 49 percent of total downloads. Cumulative app downloads from these countries represented 35 percent of the Opera Mobile Store’s global downloads by the end of September 2013.
However, Android is showing growth in these particular markets, with its share of app downloads on Opera’s mobile store growing from 11 percent in September 2012 to 32 percent in September 2013.
In a show of Facebook’s popularity in emerging markets, the most-downloaded app on Opera Mobile Store to date, measured by the number of monthly downloads, is the Java version of Facebook.
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As for chat apps, surprisingly enough, a standalone chat app for Facebook (Chat for Facebook PRO) ranks fourth — while eBuddy Messenger takes the eighth position and WeChat comes in at number nine.
Headline image via Opera
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