Skyfire was to be the solution to a major setback (as some see it) with Apple’s iPhone. It is the first iPhone browser that supports videos designed for Flash Player.
Note the careful wording here. Skyfire does not actually support Adobe Flash, but does some slick back-end work that allows the iPhone to play embedded flash videos.
Skyfire does this by translating the videos and bringing them to the native iPhone media player using the H.264 video codec. Adobe Flash technology is the most widespread format for videos and other rich content on the web, and now iOS consumers can access this broad content. (Note the solution focuses on video only; games and animations and full applications designed for Flash Player are not enabled with this solution.)
Once this functionality was announced, Skyfire went into high demand. It launched in the App Store yesterday and, after 5 hours, was “sold out.” According to the Skyfire blog:
The user experience was performing well for the first few hours, but as the surge continued, the peak load on our servers and bandwidth caused the video experience to degrade.
Thus we are effectively ‘sold out’ and will temporarily not accept new purchases from the App Store. We are working really hard to increase capacity and will be accepting new purchases from the App Store as soon as we can support it.
Quite unfortunate for those who didn’t get a chance to download the app. In those 5 hours, Skyfire for iPhone became the top grossing app, the third highest paid app overall and the top application in the Utilities category. Good deal for Skyfire, but they are going to need to get their servers on point if they want to keep raking it in like that.
via Blog | Skyfire