With more than 100 application stores available worldwide, Opera's entry into the market may be late, but unlike many of its competitors it has a key advantage of scale. Opera counts more than 105m monthly active users for its mobile browsers; 90m for the feature phone focused Opera Mini and 15m use its Opera Mobile smartphone browser. IHS Screen Digest believes Opera's desktop/PC browser has seen more than 60m downloads. For smartphones, the application store market may already be too crowded for Opera to make significant inroads. Smartphones are already well served with device, OEM and OS specific stores, some of which have superior billing platforms (e.g. with iTunes for Apple).

Opera's store will likely see greater success on feature phones, which are used by the vast majority of its users. Revenues from feature phone users are way behind smartphones, but IHS Screen Digest research indicates that non-smartphones still made up more than 75 per cent of global handset shipments in 2010. Developers aiming to target feature phone users, particularly in emerging markets, will likely be keen to offer content through Opera's store as it provides a single point of access to an audience that is clearly active in consuming some form of mobile content and data.

GetJar's removal of Opera's browsers from its store highlights the growing level of competition in the mobile applications store market. GetJar has often promoted its position as an open application store, offering free content to all platforms from all distributors. However, faced with a service that has the potential to directly compete with its own service, it was quick to remove Opera's browsers from its store.