Opera has acquired Bemobi, a Netflix-like service for premium apps

Opera has found most of its success in developing nations these past few years and the company intends to embrace that rather than trying to compete directly with the likes of Chrome and Firefox. One of the ways the web browser maker plans to do this is with Bemobi, a Brazilian subscription-based mobile-app-discovery service that it acquired last week that has become very popular in the developing world. Think of it like a Netflix for premium apps that caters to more budget-conscious users. 

Browser maker Opera today announced that it has acquired Bemobi — a subscription-based mobile-app-discovery service with a focus on the Latin American market. Opera expects the acquisition to close in the third quarter of 2015. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. What’s a “subscription-based mobile-app-discovery service,” you ask? The way Opera describes it, Bemobi is essentially Netflix for smartphone apps that gives users unlimited access to paid mobile apps for a small weekly fee. Users pay this fee through their carriers (an important feature in countries where credit- and debit-card penetration is low). Bemobi says it currently has about 6 million active subscribers. Opera is mostly known for its desktop and mobile browsers, and thanks to this, it has an extensive network of existing relationships with carriers — many of which pre-install the company’s browser on their phones. The company hopes that the combination of these existing relationships and Bemobi’s app-discovery and distribution services will “bring innovative app-discovery and monetization services across the globe and position Opera as the global leader in this space.”