iPhone Users Overwhelm “SkyFire” Server Watching Flash Content

SkyFire iPhone App

The Skyfire app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad from Skyfire Labs is an iOS app that provides a way to view Flash based web content. The way it actually does this is to have the app request Flash based content, which is then transcoded on Skyfire’s servers into an iOS friendly format, before being squirted over the web to our devices. All of this is seamless as far as users are concerned. But the more people that use the service, the busier Skyfire Lab’s servers will become.

As we all know Flash is a swear word as far as Steve Jobs and Apple are concerned. More on that in a moment.

SkyFire iPhone AppAs soon as the Skyfire app was approved iPhone users rushed to download the $2.99 app. Within 5 hours Skyfire was topping the App Store’s utility list, and then became the top grossing app on the App Store itself. Knocking “Angry Birds” off the top spot. Which means it was being downloaded in massive numbers!

Within a few hours of all this Skyfire’s servers were over-loaded, the user experience for app users was degraded, and so the company was forced to pull the app from the App Store.

The irony of a technology that Apple refuses to put on their platform because it is a resource hog, cannot be lost of Skyfire here. But it is clear that people want to at least see what all the fuss is about with Flash on iPhones, iPads and the iPod Touch. It remains to be seen how long that excitement will last.

Whether the level of usage that the app has seen is something that fits within the business model that Skyfire Labs have worked out around their $2.99 app price remains to be seen.

But they seem confident that this proves their assertion that iPhone users are desperate for Flash, and they vow to have the app back on sale as soon as they have upgraded their server farm to handle the incredible amount of customers that seem to want to use this service.

Did you get to try Skyfire out? Would you like to try it out? Let us know in the comments…

[via SkyFire]

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