Opera is pulling the plug on Opera Max. Opera Max is a standalone app designed to save across your mobile apps, especially while consuming multimedia content. If you’ve ever looked for data saving methods on Android, there is little chance that you weren’t familiar with the name. The app is no longer listed on the Google Play Store (for those that haven’t previously installed it) and won’t be getting any further updates. Existing users can still continue using Opera Max but only for “a period of time”. This will force existing users to migrate to other alternatives.
Mobile data is expensive in many parts of the world if not in yours. Opera Max offered a reprieve from the constant monitoring by compressing the data through its servers. Opera announced the decision in a blog post, citing the fact that the app offered “a substantially different value proposition than our browser products, and represented a different focus for Opera.” That’s the corporate way of saying “we are choosing to cop-out”.
We don’t know when this server side killing will happen but Opera promises to “inform these users about the termination of server-side support”. Since its launch in 2014, Opera’s data saving app underwent many changes but the recent addition of apps and the constant nagging to open the app and see the ads wasn’t one of the nicer changes.
If you were using Opera Max that might be a bummer. You can still use the Turbo mode in Opera for Android, although it’s not the same experience. Instead of doing things with apps, you will have to rely on the browser to watch videos and stuff. But hey, we know just the apps that can fill the void left by Opera Max.
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DataEye
[googleplay url=”https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lotusflare.datasensor&hl=en”/]DataEye is probably the highest rated data-saving app on the Play Store that is not Opera Max. Although, the app does work quite similar to Opera’s app. Simply turn it on and leave it be while you go on with your daily life. The app will keep running in the background, directing your data traffic through its servers and saving data. It too tracks how much data each app on your phone is using so you know which ones are eating up your precious data.
Protect Free VPN+Data Manager
[googleplay url=”https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onavo.spaceship”/]Protect is an app by Onavo which is also a VPN as well as a data saver like Opera Max was/is. Could they make that any more obvious? While Opera Max was pretty awesome, it did not have the most user-friendly interface. That is also a problem, in a way with DataEye. Protect on the other hand is very simple to use. Once you turn on the service, it shows you all your apps in a simple list right on the main screen along with their data usage. You can tap any app on the list to access further options. The app lets you limit data from being used in the background, restrict data usage to only WiFi, set usage alerts about data usage by specific apps, and more.
This provides much more control over your data than Android’s built-in data saving features.
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Triangle: More Mobile Data
[googleplay url=”https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.freighter&hl=en”/]Triangle, you may be surprised to know, is an app by Google. The way any app by the Android maker garners the interest of users and media upon its release, it might be surprising that you’ve most probably never heard of this one. But it does not sound as surprising when you consider the fact that the app is currently only available in the Philippines.
Google’s own data saving app is very much like the data saving feature it added in Chrome for Android a while back. The app can block unnecessary background data usage when you’re on a mobile network, allows the user to choose which apps can use data and set time limits for how long they have access to data, and more.
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