Stay on Top of Emerging Technology Trends Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community

Opera is now claiming more than 100 million users of its Android browsers, with India leading the charge, followed by China, Indonesia, Russia and Mexico.

The lightweight Opera Mini is the most popular Opera browser on Android, followed by the full-fat Opera for Android browser, then the Opera Max beta app for Android, which compresses data used by other apps.

Overall it’s an impressive number – 103.9 Android million users in the second quarter of this year, up 74 percent on the second quarter of 2013 — but probably still well behind the number using Opera on feature phones, though it’s hard to tell for sure.

According to quarterly results released late last week, [company]Opera[/company] had 270.8 million mobile users at the end of Q2. Of those, 246 million — over 90 percent — are using Mini, but the firm won’t break that down by platform.

Some people will be using Mini or the Coast browser on [company]Apple[/company] iOS but, due to Opera’s data-saving appeal at the low end of the market, my guess is that the majority are on feature phones. And those numbers may grow in the short term, as Microsoft’s dying Nokia Series 40/30+ ranges will use Mini as their default browser through the end of 2015.

And on desktop? Not nearly as good – Opera has only 51 million desktop browser users, down two percent year-on-year. In the overall picture, Opera has owned between 1.5 and 2 percent of the desktop browser market for years now, whereas it has around 11 percent of the handset market. Even that’s down from around 15 percent a year back, largely because [company]Google[/company] Chrome’s share has been growing like crazy.

Opera wouldn’t comment on its market share, saying it doesn’t rely on third-party figures (I used StatCounter there), but it looks like the Norwegian firm is doing well out of Android’s rise in emerging markets. As for whether that boost will offset the corresponding decline in feature phone usage, we’ll just have to wait and see.