Opera is pretty well known for their Android browsers, which can save you data when you’re browsing the web. But some of you may not know about Opera Max, or what exactly it does. Basically it compress data from any app on your smartphone. And with data limits from just about every carrier these days, this is a good way to make your data plan go just a little bit further. Today, Opera Max just got a bit more powerful, as the company announced that the app can now compress data from audio apps like Pandora, Slacker and SoundCloud. So if you’re a user of any of those apps, you’ll be able to get more bang for your buck when it comes to your data plan.
Opera Max had already added support for compressing video data from YouTube and Netflix and now you can add audio to that list. Between video and audio, that is likely the biggest source of all of your data each month. Video more so than audio, depending on the quality you’re streaming. Now the best part about Opera Max is the fact that you don’t need to do a single thing to enable this. As long as you have Opera Max installed, you just start using Pandora, SoundCloud or Slacker like you normally would. It can’t get much better than that. However, if Opera Max adds in Google Play Music and Spotify, it would get even better.
Now this feature from Opera Max is great, and if you aren’t on T-Mobile or Virgin Mobile, it will likely cut your data usage down quite a bit. The reason why I singled out both T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile, is they have whitelisted a number of audio and music apps, so that their data doesn’t count against your limit. T-Mobile has been doing this for about a year now with their Music Freedom, and it’s a great feature, especially for those that stream a lot of audio over 4G LTE.
If you don’t already use Opera Max, you can download it from the source links down below, and save yourself some data.