Opera has announced that its Mini and Mobile browsers have been updated on all platforms, including Android, iOS, S60, J2ME, BlackBerry, S60 and MeeGo. A data usage view is the primary new feature available on all devices, enabling users to take a quick look at how much data the browser has used and a comparison between the original page sizes and the savings due to Opera's compression technology.
Use of mobile apps has grown to where they're now overtaking the web as the preferred format on phones, Flurry said in a new study on Monday. Where the web was still the most used in a given day a year ago at 64 minutes per day versus 43, the situation has now reversed. As of this month, phone owners spend about 81 minutes in apps per day and an increased but still lower 74 minutes on the web, marking the first time the web wasn't the main avenue.
More than 70 percent of iPhone app developers plan to also write for Android in the next six months, AdMob found in a study Tuesday. While the portion of multi-platform developers should jump from 31 percent to 47 percent over the period, the majority is likely to be adding Google's platform to whatever they already support. About half (48 percent) of Android developers plan to add the iPhone to their rosters.
(Update: Facebook disputes the figure) Apple is rapidly widening the gap between its app platform and Facebook, new data from Flurry found today. Although the gap was relatively small about five months into the app portals' respective lifespans, by the 1.5 year mark Apple now has more than twice as many apps. The iPhone App Store's 140,000 confirmed apps easily outweigh the 60,000 web-based apps of Facebook's social network.
