A New York Times profile on Opera Software last week sought to add more fuel to the old anti-competitiveness-based arbitrary app rejection fire that surrounds Apple’s App Store. The report said that the Opera Mini browser had been rejected by Apple from their app store due to the old chestnut of it mirroring Apple software’s functions too closely.

The rejection, it was believed, was related to Opera’s built-in JavaScript interpreter, but research by analyst John Gruber says Opera Mini doesn’t even have such functionality.

He explains the “browser’s” functionality as follows. “In a nut, it works like this: You request a URL in Opera Mini. Opera Mini makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. Opera's proxy server connects to the web server hosting the requested URL, and renders the page into an image. This image is then transmitted (in a proprietary format called OBML - Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client. Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective - it’s faster to transmit, because only OBML (a compressed binary format) is transmitted to the mobile device over the phone network, and far faster to render on slow mobile processors.”

The software, which is essentially not a true browser, is simply an emulator of sorts to help lower-powered phones to load pages faster. There are problems: the links don’t work as well, the resolution is poor.

So why would you even use this on the iPhone? Opera doesn’t know either as it appears they never built it. An entry on the Opera Blog says:

''It's pretty well known by now that Apple blocks competitors from their store, but I'm not sure if we've ever confirmed that we actually had Opera Mini ready for the iPhone.''

So the app that was never made was not rejected from the app store. That’s the whole of the shocking news report.