Impossible! How did Opera got accepted into App Store? I think I have a theory. The reason why most believed that Opera Mini will never be approved by Apple is because of "duplication of functionality" clause in the ToS. People see Opera as a web browser as "duplicating the functionality" of Safari on the iPhone OS. Therefore Apple would never approve of the app.

But think of it this way. Technically, Opera Mini is not a web browser. It does not connect directly to the web servers to grab HTML, parses and renders it. It is just a thin client that sends URL request to Opera's servers and receives something that looks like web pages back in a form of OBML, Opera's proprietary protocol. It is the server that is fetching and processing the site as well as compressing the results before sending it back to your device. In the end, Opera Mini is technically a thin client that accesses a service provided by Opera in a way like RDP/VNC client apps accessing Windows machines.

So now since Opera has proven that "thin client style" browser apps can exist on iPhone OS. The next mobile browser I would like to see on the iPhone OS is Skyfire. Skyfire also works the same way as Opera Mini except that its server is able to stream flash, java silverlight content directly to your device. Skyfire is currently on Windows mobile and Symbian S60. Although, I think that third party browsers will not be as slick as native mobile Safari. But they are very useful sometimes. How many times have you visited a site using mobile Safari during an emergency trying just to get some little pieces of info, only to realise that the info is trapped in a flash container that requires flash plugin to view it?