It’s been three days since Apple approved Opera Mini for the App Store, so you may be wondering how the little browser that could has fared. In a nut: incredibly well.
In a press release, Opera boasts that its mobilized, proxy-dependent browser was downloaded more than a million times in its first day of availability. In fact, it became the number one free download across all 22 international App Stores.
This is an impressive feat, especially considering the security and scaling problems presented by Opera’s “all your browsing are belong to our proxy servers” approach. Every Website that users browse and enter passwords into first goes through Opera servers that compress, decrypt, and re-encrypt, all in an effort to save on bandwidth, transfer times, and data plan bills.
Setting aside concerns about giving away one’s sensitive passwords and other identity information to a third party, Opera Mini’s initial blow-out success may be evidence that users were actually looking for an alternative to Safari—or, perhaps, were at least curious about what it offered.