Opera Mobile Store was a platform-independent browser-based app store for mobile-phone owners and a digital application distribution platform used by more than 40,000 developers. It is owned and maintained by Opera. Launched by a third-party provider in March 2011, the Opera Mobile Store was relaunched on a new platform, after acquisition of Handster, a mobile app store platform company, in January 2012. The service allows users to browse and download applications for over 7,500 different devices on Android, Java, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, iOS, and Windows Mobile.
Opera Mobile Store has than 1 million app downloads a day and is accessible from any mobile phone via a bookmark or the Start Page of Opera Mini or Opera Mobile browsers. The store is also accessible from any other browser, including desktop versions, and on any operating system, from https://apps.opera.com/. The Opera Mobile Store then forwards the user to the country-specific store based on the location information provided by the mobile carrier or ISP.
Over 86% of the applications for Android-powered phones provided by the Opera Mobile Store are free of charge. The average free-vs.-paid-apps ratio for all platforms is 70% and 30%, respectively. These applications are generally targeted on a particular category, including video games, business applications, social media apps, e-books, and others.