Three weeks after booting the Opera Mini web browser from its app store, GetJar and Opera have come to an agreement that again allows the browser to be featured among GetJar’s offerings. The dispute began when Opera announced it was launching its own app store, accessible directly from the Opera Mini browser, thus becoming a direct competitor to independent app-store giant GetJar. While details of the settlement between the parties have not been released, the version of Opera Mini now offered by GetJar does not link to Opera’s app store, according to Industry news service Fierce Mobile Content.
 

Within the past year handset manufacturers, operating system developers, carriers and independent stores have all entered the application distribution space. In this growing ecosystem, it is increasingly difficult to determine which players are friends and which are foes – or both. For the consumer, the result has been better competition, with a wider variety of apps to choose from at greater value, but the chaos of the app store scene threatens to confuse consumers and frustrate app developers. Taking the example of the GetJar-Opera resolution, it simply is not intuitive for a consumer to have an Opera Mini browser with a direct link to the Opera app store while her spouse (daughter, brother, friend, etc.) has a version of the same browser without such a link, simply because the browser was downloaded from a different location. While Parks Associates’ consumer data suggests that smartphone users increasingly prefer apps over browsers for many mobile Internet tasks, this inconsistency of experience threatens this budding trend. As long as the app distribution ecosystem remains a fragmented one, app distributors and app developers would be wise to make the consistency of the consumer experience a priority.