Opera's monthly active users on Android and iOS grew a combined 48 percent across the United Kingdom and the United States during the second quarter, the Norwegian browser maker said today, with the sharpest single gain arriving on iOS in the UK, where usage climbed 93 percent year over year.

The figures, disclosed by Opera [NASDAQ: OPRA] in a statement released today, split into four distinct growth rates. In the UK, Opera One for iOS grew 93 percent and Opera One for Android grew 50 percent, giving a combined UK MAU increase of 66 percent. In the US, Opera One for iOS grew 50 percent and Opera One for Android grew 30 percent, a combined US increase of 40 percent. Averaged across both markets, Opera describes the headline figure as 48 percent growth.

Jørgen Arnesen, Opera's EVP Mobile, framed the expansion as evidence of unprompted adoption rather than distribution deals or default placements. "Our growth comes from people purposefully choosing us," Arnesen said in the announcement. "What we're seeing now is that growth is spreading to the US and the UK. People are finding their way to us on their own, which tells us the product is doing the work."

The announcement lands the same week that independent researchers published new findings on how Microsoft's Windows operating system continues to steer users toward its own Edge browser, a pattern that persisted for 1.4 billion Windows devices despite two years of regulatory scrutiny. Opera's growth claim, that users are switching to its browsers "on their own," sits against that broader backdrop of contested default settings and interface design across the industry.

What the numbers show, market by market

Opera's growth figures separate cleanly by platform and geography, and the divergence between iOS and Android is the most striking element of the release. In the UK, iOS growth ran at 93 percent against 50 percent on Android, a 43 percentage point gap. In the US, the gap was narrower but still substantial: 50 percent on iOS against 30 percent on Android, a 20 point difference.

That pattern, iOS consistently outpacing Android within the same market, mirrors what Opera reported for Europe over the preceding twelve months. According to the company's announcement, Opera One for iOS grew 42 percent across Europe during the last year, with the sharpest gains recorded in France, where growth reached 103 percent.

The company attributes at least part of the iOS acceleration to a regulatory change rather than product changes alone. The European Union's Digital Markets Act, which became legally binding for designated gatekeepers in March 2024, introduced a browser choice screen inside Apple's iOS operating system starting in 2024. Before that requirement, iOS users in the EU had no in-system prompt to consider browsers other than Safari when setting up a device or seeking a change. Opera's announcement states that mobile growth in Europe "accelerated after the EU's 2024 Digital Markets Act (DMA), which introduced a ballot screen giving iOS users a real choice of mobile browser for the first time, and provided Android users - who could already choose - with more visibility of the available browser options."

Notably, however, the DMA's choice screen requirement applies within the European Union and European Economic Area. It does not extend to the UK or the US, both of which fall outside its jurisdiction. That distinction matters for interpreting today's figures: the 93 percent iOS growth rate in the UK and the 50 percent rate in the US occurred in markets where no equivalent ballot screen exists, at least not one mandated by EU law specifically. Opera's own framing acknowledges this shift explicitly, describing the UK and US growth as evidence that "growth is spreading" beyond the regulatory environment that first catalyzed it in Europe.

A quarter of unprompted, not incentivized, switching

Opera draws a distinction in its announcement between what regulation can achieve and what it cannot. "Years of consistent growth have shown that while regulation can aid user acquisition, it does not guarantee retention," the company states. Users, in other words, might sample an unfamiliar browser once a choice screen surfaces it, but whether they stay depends on whether the product delivers something they value enough to keep using.

According to Opera, the retention rests on four features the company says differentiate it from browser alternatives. These include a VPN service with no subscription fee, no data cap, and no activity logging; a native ad blocker built into the browser rather than requiring a separate extension; tab management tools including automatic grouping through a feature called Tab Islands, alongside instant tab search; and a built-in browser AI enabling users to search, generate content, and retrieve answers without leaving the browser or opening a separate application.

Recent product updates precede the growth figures

Opera's announcement links this quarter's user growth to a series of feature updates rolled out across both its iOS and Android mobile browsers in recent months. On iOS, the company says its latest Opera One update introduced a revised synchronization system, letting users move tabs, bookmarks, and passwords between desktop and iPhone in both directions. The same update added media controls directly to the tab interface, allowing users to identify which open tabs are playing audio and to mute or unmute them without switching tabs. Opera's browser AI also gained new input capabilities on iOS, according to the announcement, with users now able to submit multimodal prompts and upload files directly from an iPhone.

On Android, Opera says its browser recently reached its hundredth version milestone. That release included a redesigned browser start page and what the company calls a dedicated football hub, timed ahead of the summer's international football schedule. The hub brings live scores, match statistics, and player pages directly into the browser rather than requiring users to open a separate sports app or website.

Opera reports a measurable effect from that feature specifically. Since the football hub's release, the company says visits to the scores section within Opera for Android increased 70 percent compared with the traffic levels the company typically observes during an English Premier League season. Opera characterizes this engagement as substantive rather than incidental, stating that users "are going deep into the feature seeking goal alerts, match stats, and commentary."

The football hub illustrates what Opera describes as its broader product philosophy: building requested functionality directly into the browser rather than directing users toward a separate downloadable app or add-on.

Reading the numbers against the wider browser market

Opera's growth claims arrive without accompanying absolute user figures, a detail worth noting for anyone assessing the scale of the reported increases. A 93 percent year over year gain on a small base produces a very different real-world outcome than the same percentage gain on a large one, and the announcement does not disclose the starting monthly active user counts for either the UK or the US market. Opera's global position in independent browser tracking data offers some context, however. Cloudflare's Q3 2025 browser market share report placed Opera at roughly 1.5 percent of global browser traffic, trailing Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox by a wide margin, though the two datasets are not directly comparable since Cloudflare measures overall traffic share rather than platform specific monthly active user growth.

The broader competitive landscape for mobile browsers has also shifted in ways that touch on the regulatory theme running through Opera's own announcement. A University of Antwerp analysis published earlier this month examined all ten of the Digital Markets Act's core platform service categories and singled out browsers as the one area where the regulation appears to be producing a measurable, quantified shift in user behavior, an effect the paper attributed largely to the EU's mandated choice screens rather than organic competitive dynamics. The same research, however, found that the beneficiaries of that contestability were overwhelmingly American companies, Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox, rather than European alternatives, and specifically noted that Opera and Samsung Internet ranked only fifth and sixth in EU browser popularity, both markedly smaller than the four leading, American-headquartered browsers.

That finding complicates a simple reading of Opera's own growth narrative. The company frames its European gains as flowing from the DMA's choice screen requirement, and its UK and US gains as evidence the product now succeeds independent of any comparable regulatory nudge. Yet the Antwerp paper suggests that even within the EU market where the choice screen operates as designed, Opera remains a minor beneficiary relative to the four dominant browsers, all of which are also enjoying a share of whatever contestability effect exists. Whether Opera's growth in the UK and US genuinely reflects unprompted user choice, as Arnesen's statement claims, or partly reflects broader browser switching dynamics that also favor larger competitors, is a distinction the currently available data cannot resolve on its own.

Browser default settings themselves remain a contested area more broadly. Research published in May 2026 by Mozilla, examining how Microsoft's Windows operating system handles browser choice across four countries, found that harmful interface patterns identified in a 2024 predecessor study largely persisted two years later, with new findings extending into how Microsoft's Copilot assistant and Windows Backup migration tool handle a user's previously chosen default browser. That research found EEA test cases showed measurably fewer of these patterns than the US, UK, and India, a divergence the study's authors attributed to Digital Markets Act pressure specifically rather than a broader change in corporate practice. Set against that finding, Opera's claim that UK and US users are "finding their way" to its browser without an equivalent regulatory prompt describes a market where the platform layer, at the level of Windows and iOS default settings, continues to shape which browsers users encounter in the first place, even where no choice screen exists.

Why this matters for marketers and publishers

For advertising professionals and publishers, browser-level shifts of this kind carry practical consequences beyond simple market share tracking. A browser's identity determines which cookie policies apply during a session, which tracking prevention defaults are active, and increasingly, whether a built-in AI assistant intermediates a user's path before they reach a landing page at all. Opera's built-in ad blocker, highlighted in today's announcement as a core retention feature, directly affects the volume and type of advertising that reaches users of its mobile browsers, a consideration relevant to any media plan that assumes uniform ad delivery across browser environments.

The wider context around browser defaults and default-setting friction has drawn sustained attention from the marketing trade press this year. Attribution systems built around assumptions of stable browser environments face growing uncertainty as operating system vendors, browser makers, and now AI assistant providers each shape which browser a click actually passes through. Opera's growth, whatever its ultimate causes, adds one more data point to a browser market in which user defaults are proving less settled than media planning models have historically assumed.

Timeline

  • 2024: The European Union's Digital Markets Act becomes legally binding for designated gatekeepers, introducing a browser choice screen requirement for iOS
  • Last year (per Opera's announcement): Opera One for iOS grows 42 percent across Europe over a twelve month period, with France recording 103 percent growth
  • Recent months: Opera for Android reaches its hundredth version, adding a redesigned start page and a dedicated football hub
  • Recent months: Opera One for iOS receives an updated cross-device synchronization system, tab audio controls, and multimodal AI prompt support
  • Second quarter (per Opera's announcement): Opera One for iOS grows 93 percent in the UK and 50 percent in the US, year over year; Opera One for Android grows 50 percent in the UK and 30 percent in the US
  • Today, July 14, 2026: Opera publicly announces the combined 48 percent UK and US mobile growth figures

Summary

Who: Opera [NASDAQ: OPRA], the Norwegian browser and AI agent company, alongside Jørgen Arnesen, the company's EVP Mobile, who provided the sole named quote in today's announcement.

What: Opera reported that combined monthly active users of its Android and iOS browsers grew 66 percent in the UK and 40 percent in the US during the second quarter, year over year, driven by especially strong iOS growth of 93 percent in the UK and 50 percent in the US.

When: Opera released the figures today, July 14, 2026, covering growth measured during the second quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier.

Where: The reported growth spans the United Kingdom and the United States specifically, with the announcement also referencing prior growth across the European Union, where Opera One for iOS grew 42 percent over the preceding year.

Why: The figures matter because they document mobile browser switching in markets, the UK and US, that fall outside the European Union's Digital Markets Act and its mandated browser choice screen, a distinction Opera itself highlights as evidence that its growth now extends beyond the regulatory conditions that first accelerated adoption in Europe, even as independent research on both DMA outcomes and Windows browser defaults complicates any simple reading of how much of that growth reflects unprompted user choice versus broader shifts in the browser competitive landscape.