This New App for Your Smartphone Could Save You a Lot on Your Mobile Bill

Brian Heater
·Tech Columnist
Updated
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A mobile app that can actually cut down your monthly data bills? It sounds too good to be true, but that’s precisely the promise behind Opera Max, from the Norwegian company that brought us the Opera web browsers.

Launched this week as an open beta for Americans with Android phones, Opera’s new offering uses compression technology to shrink the amount of data you’re using across most apps on your Android - that’s Internet browsing, browsing social media or streaming music and video. The app is particularly useful, the company says, if you watch a lot of video on your mobile device (as we all increasingly do these days).

One thing The Verge notes: Data from encrypted sites (like Facebook), or apps that access sites which are encrypted (the Facebook app, for instance), cannot be compressed by Opera Max.

Google recently released a version of its Chrome browser for Android that promises the same 50 percent data compression.

Opera Max measures your data usage via VPN — a private network technology you’re probably familiar with if you’ve spent any time working in an office. Then Opera Max sends your data requests through Opera’s compression servers. The result is fewer data requests for the same amount of content.

The company claims that the app is capable of extending your available data by up to 50 percent. That means that if you’ve got a mobile data plan that gives you 1 GB of content, you can potentially use up to 1.5 GB on that same plan without being charged for overages.

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If you’re the sort who enjoys obsessively tracking that sort of savings, the app has a built-in usage timeline, so you can tell how much data you’re saving on a per-day, per-month or by-app basis.

Intrigued? Opera is offering beta sign-ups for Android phone owners in the United States on a first-come, first-serve basis. The app will be free to start, but future versions may run ads or charge users a small amount per month.

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