Skyfire launched a mobile browser which enables iPhone users to view Flash video content via the Apple App Store, although its availability was short-lived when demand meant the infrastructure supporting the product was overwhelmed. While Apple has banned the delivery of Flash-based content to iPhone browsers, Skyfire has worked its way around this by transcoding content into Apple-supported formats using its servers, for delivery to the Skyfire browser. The company says in a blog post that it has now “effectively sold out,” and that it will temporarily not be allowing new purchases. The strong launch was also suggested by observers to be an indicator of pent-up demand for Flash video content among the iPhone user base – or perhaps, more accurately, demand for customers to access Flash-enabled websites.

While Apple has mellowed its stance somewhat toward Flash in recent months, this has been for Flash content packaged as a native app – and not, therefore, running in the device browser. However, much of the multimedia content available on the Internet is delivered in Flash format, meaning that this is unavailable to iOS device users. Skyfire notes that its browser “focuses on video only”; games, animations and full apps designed for Flash player are not supported. The app also has efficiency benefits: it is said to compress data by an average of 75 percent, because a large percentage of web video was encoded for playback on PCs with broadband connections, and not optimised for mobile.

Skyfire first announced its iOS app early in September 2010, when it was submitted to the App Store – this was before Apple had issued clearer guidelines on the approvals process for products. Skyfire says it has subsequently “made minor adjustments to the software, based on submission feedback, to ensure all of Apple’s guidelines regarding HTML5 video streaming are met.” It uses the WebKit browser core shared with Apple’s own Safari browser, and uses h.264 adaptive content streaming.

Within five hours of availability, Skyfire for iPhone became the top-grossing iOS app, the third highest paid app overall, and the top app in the utilities category. When available, the app costs US$2.99. The company has previously trumpeted one million downloads for the Android version of the browser.