Opera buys white label app store firm
Handster allows the browser maker to expand its increasingly broad applications platform for operators and OEMs
Published: 20 September, 2011
READ MORE: M&A | App Store | Applications (Browser)
As its core browser products get squeezed by a wealth of WebKit smartphone offerings, Opera Software has been steadily expanding its activities to create a full mobile platform including advertising and apps. Now it has acquired Handster, a supplier of white label app stores.
Handster will help Opera with a key strategy, getting closer to operators, especially in emerging economies, and creating mobile web solutions for them as their featurephone users start to migrate to smart devices. Among the company's carrier customers are Russian giant MTS, and it also provides store and content services to vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei and LG. Embedding the Opera browser and other services into OEMs' products and platforms is also an important way to keep the Norwegian firm's products heavily used even when, at the high end, vendor browsers such as Apple Safari are increasingly offered as the default.
Handster brings Opera a large independent content library plus a white label app store with developer tools and services for content management and curation, and billing. Android is the main operating system but the platform also supports Java and Symbian - both important for their large installed base on midrange handsets - plus Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and netbooks.
All this will expand the Opera Mobile Store offering, unveiled in March, which promises to create a store with local content and currency, optimized to behave efficiently on the user's particular handset. That storefront was built for Opera by Appia, and supports free and paid-for apps in 200 countries. It can also be used without the Opera browsers.
In other recent moves, Opera has partnered with content payment and analytics firm Bango to introduce new billing options such as carrier billing and in-app purchasing, and it also has a mobile advertising platform.
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