Opera Mini Has Doubled Its Market Share Since App Store Acceptance

Opera is not the world’s most popular browser, despite being one of the best. Small size however does not mean that Opera has not been innovating, especially in the mobile market.

Opera scored a major coup just a few days ago when Opera Mini (their mobile browser) was included in the Apple App store, for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. What has access to those tens of millions of devices done to Opera Mini’s market share? It doubled, in just three days.

Web analytics firm Clicky (we use them here at TNW, for disclosure), tracks mobile browser market share across the sites that use their service. Safari Mobile (iPhone, etc) and Blackberry dominate the scene with more than 80% of the market between them. Take a look at the graph below, it explains the whole story:

That little green line is Opera Mini, in all its glory. You will note that its market share has been more or less flat for months on end. However if you look at the last few days, everything changes. On April 11th, Opera Mini controlled just 1.63% of the Mobile browser market.

Today it stands at just over 3.4%, a more than 100% increase nearly instantly. And people thought that Apple only liked themselves and could not share.

Still with a mere rounding error slice of the pie, Opera has miles to go to be a real player, but the momentum that it has picked up in the last week is going to do wonders for the company’s efforts. Safari Mobile might lose a few points to Opera Mini, but for it to mean anything, Opera needs to show consumers that it has something that no one else has.

Have you used Opera Mini, what do you think of it? Better than Safari Mobile? Better than Blackberry?