Opera has decided to discontinue its Opera Max application. The company announced the change in direction in a blog post on its website. The main reason for the shut down was because Opera wants to focus on browsers and other upcoming services.
Opera Max was released as an application in 2014 which
allowed users to manage as well drastically reduce data usage across
applications in the Android ecosystem. The app will no longer receive
updates in the future and it 'has also been delisted' from the Google
Play Store. The interesting part about the delisting is that we could
still access the app in Google Play Store at the time of writing.
The company mentioned that in the post that "The product had a substantially different value proposition than our browser products, and represented a different focus for Opera. We, therefore, focus on our browsers and other upcoming services."
The company, however, clarified that existing Opera Max users will be able to continue using the service for the time being. A termination of server-side support will take place soon, about which users will be informed ahead.
The news of the discontinuation of Opera Max comes as a
surprise as the application was awarded for 'Innovation in Mobile First
Markets' by Meffys as recently as December 2016. Opera Max
was awarded after its success in Africa, enabling users to adapt to the
smartphone revolution thanks to its advanced data compression
technology which helped cut data cost by up to 50% on mobile data as
well as WiFi.
Image: Opera
The company mentioned that in the post that "The product had a substantially different value proposition than our browser products, and represented a different focus for Opera. We, therefore, focus on our browsers and other upcoming services."
The company, however, clarified that existing Opera Max users will be able to continue using the service for the time being. A termination of server-side support will take place soon, about which users will be informed ahead.
Image: Opera
The app also helped save data on streaming services like Netflix
and YouTube. Opera had also recently introduced a privacy mode on the
app, providing an extra layer of protection on connections while saving
data.

No comments:
Post a Comment