The Skyfire application for iPhone users was so popular today it crashed the company's servers with demand outpacing capacity
Today a company named Skyfire released a little application in the Apple iTunes Store that solves a big problem for iPhone users. The Skyfire app gets around the lack of Adobe Flash support in the iPhone web browser.
Apple has yet to support Adobe’s Flash Player on the iPhone for a variety of speculated reasons. Apple has continually dismissed Flash and refused to offer support for it. Unfortunately this has been the case for not just the iPhone, but the iPad as well.
Enter Skyfire and their workaround for at least part of the problem. While the application won’t offer support for sites utilizing Flash technology for online games and whatnot, it will provide the ability to view Flash videos on the iPhone.
It accomplishes this through some ingenuity and creative problem solving. When a Flash video is clicked on while browsing from the iPhone, Skyfire sends the link to its servers. Those servers transparently download the video and convert into an HMTL5 video, allowing it to be played natively on the iPhone.
It’s no surprise that the Skyfire app was a big hit today. In fact, it was so popular that users ended up crashing the Skyfire servers with requests. The company had to mark the app as Sold Out in the iTunes Store to get a handle on the demand before adding new users.
The Skyfire app, when available in the iTunes Store, sells for $2.99.
