Why did Apple finally approve Opera Mini for the iPhone? Because on smart­phones, browsers don’t matter.

One of the most impor­tant mes­sages to come out of last week’s iPhone 4 sneak pre­view event at Apple has kind of fallen off the radar. In the iAd part of the pre­sen­ta­tion, Jobs said, “Search has not hap­pened on a mobile device like on the desk­top. Peo­ple spend all their time in apps; they go into Yelp and don’t do gen­eral searches. This is where the oppor­tu­nity is — within apps, not search.”

This is a major depar­ture from the mes­sage com­ing from Apple in the early days of the iPhone. In 2007, it was all about Mobile Safari, search­ing and web apps. Three years later, the plat­form has matured and a dif­fer­ent use case has emerged. Most iPhone users don’t use Safari all that much. Even when they search, they do it in dis­crete apps rather than in Safari. When I want to find out who some guest star is in one of my favorite TV shows, I don’t open Safari or even the Google or Bing apps on my iPhone. I open the IMDB app and look it up from there. It’s faster, more tar­geted and an expe­ri­ence designed for the iPhone screen size.

Jobs gets this, and Apple’s new ad plat­form is designed to exploit that. Google fig­ured out a decade ago that peo­ple are much more recep­tive to ads if they’re tar­geted to them and their spe­cific inter­ests. With iAd, Apple has removed a lot of the guess­work even fur­ther. If you’re using an app, you’re prob­a­bly going to be most recep­tive to ads with the same focus as the app you’re using. This gives Apple even more reli­able tar­get­ing than Google’s use of keywords.

But there’s another side to this as well, one that I think is inter­est­ing in an of itself. Google’s ads live, for the most part, in browsers, because that’s how most peo­ple inter­act with the inter­net on “big” com­put­ers. As a mat­ter of fact, I’m typ­ing this post on a net­book (though I started it in the Word­Press app on my iPhone) and the only appli­ca­tion I’m run­ning is Fire­fox. In var­i­ous tabs, though, I have Gmail, Google Docs, Pan­dora, Sobees for Twitter/​Facebook and Meebo for IM.

But on my iPhone, I can go months with­out even open­ing Safari. It just doesn’t fac­tor into my work­flow, even though I use all the same web-​based ser­vices on my iPhone that I use on my net­book and my desk­top. The dif­fer­ence is that on my iPhone I have dis­creet app for each ser­vice. I have a Meebo app for IM that sends me push noti­fi­ca­tions when I have a new mes­sage. I use Reeder to keep up on my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I use Tweetie (soon to be just Twit­ter for iPhone) for Twit­ter. When I find an arti­cle I want to read later in either, I send it over to Instapa­per, and read them in the Instapa­per app. I use Quick­Of­fice Con­nect to edit Google Docs directly, the iPhone’s Cal­en­dar app for my Google Cal­en­dar, Action Lists to give my Too­dledo to-​do list a GTD workflow.

So when Apple approved Opera Mini for the iPhone last week, I wasn’t sur­prised at all. Apple has demon­strated that they under­stand very well that browsers don’t mat­ter on smart­phones. Opera Mini is just another app, no more use­ful to the aver­age iPhone owner than Safari, which is to say not very use­ful at all. It’s likely to be ignored most of the time, because that’s what hap­pens to smart­phone browsers. Smart­phones are dif­fer­ent than “com­put­ers” as we tra­di­tion­ally think of them, and while both plat­forms need access to the inter­net, how they do it varies greatly. The size of the screen makes a qual­i­ta­tive, not quan­ti­ta­tive, dif­fer­ence in how the device is used and how it accesses information.

And if you think that last sen­tence means that devices like the Apple iPad and Microsoft Courier are some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent from both smart­phones and full com­put­ers, well, that’s a post for another time.