Opera is discontinuing Opera Max, its standalone app designed to save data across your mobile applications. Opera Max has been delisted from the Google Play Store, and won't be getting any new updates. Existing users can carry on using Opera Max, but only for "a period of time".

Mobile data plans can be expensive, and you don't get much for your money. This leaves most of us acutely aware of how much data we use when not on Wi-Fi. Opera Max offered a reprieve from the constant monitoring, compressing your mobile data. Unfortunately, Opera Max is now toast.

Opera's Data-Saving Tech on Steroids

For the uninitiated, Opera Max was a standalone app that offered Opera's data-savings technology on steroids. Opera Max would channel all incoming traffic through Opera's servers, compressing the data to save the end user's bandwidth. It did this both for websites and media streams.

In a blog post, Opera has announced its decision to "discontinue Opera Max". The reason given for killing this popular product was that it offered "a substantially different value proposition than our browser products, and represented a different focus for Opera". Which sounds like a cop-out.

Opera Max has already been delisted from the Play Store, and there will be "no further upgrades" released. The service will, however, "remain intact for our existing users for a period of time". And Opera promises to "inform these users about the termination of server-side support".

Opera Max was launched in 2014, and has undergone some serious changes in the years since. As noted by Ghacks, while Opera did good by adding a privacy mode, it also started displaying ads in the application, and nagged users to open the app in order to show them the aforementioned ads.

Making It Harder to Track Your Mobile Data

Opera Max is a real loss if you struggle to stay under your mobile data limit. Unfortunately, it seems it wasn't worth Opera's time and energy to keep it around. Still, there is always the Turbo mode in Opera for Android to fall back on, but it's not quite the same level of awesome.

Do you have Opera Max installed on your Android? Are you upset that Opera is pulling it from the Play Store? Will you continue using it despite the lack of support? Do you know of any alternatives capable of compressing all of your data? The comments are open below!