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

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.”