The Skyfire iPhone app was always going to be a phenomenon because it was set to enable iPhone users to watch Flash animation, graphics, and video clips on their Apple devices. Skyfire were clearly unaware of just how popular it would prove to be, though, as their servers crumpled under the pressure of people rushing to download their app. It had even been released a day early on Wednesday of this week but it only managed a few hours of being downloaded by just about everybody.
Apple devices, including the iPod, iPad, and iPhone do not support Flash files because, despite the fact that Adobe claims 75% of all video hosted online is Flash encoded, Steve Jobs said that Flash does not run well on mobile devices and consumes battery power too quickly. If it were any other company we’d imagine that download figures from Skyfire would push them into adopting a new take on the whole thing but Apple does have a tendency to stick by its decisions through thick and thin.
With the application, when a user clicks on a Flash file, Skyfire’s servers download the file, render and translate the video so that it’s in a format that the Apple iOS can understand and display. The technology has proven to be effective and incredibly popular as the Android version has already been downloaded 1.5 million times from the Android marketplace since its launch in April.
The app became the biggest grossing app on the Apple marketplace on Wednesday and the third most downloaded. However, this was the company’s first foray into the world of paid apps and CEO Jeffrey Glueck said “It was hard to predict consumer demand since this was our first paid app, but we were blown away by the demand and sales.”
The company are working hard to remedy the situation so that they can sell their next batch of the app as soon as possible.
