Adobe killed Flash for mobile devices beginning with the next version. FINALLY!
Gone in a “flash”
It has been said that Flash will never appear on the iPhone. For a brief time, that was almost untrue. Skyfire Labs, Inc. brought the Flash experience to the iPhone last night and now it is gone. The idea was that the Skyfire browser would act as a proxy/transcoder/browser. You go to website that requires flash and the browser sends it to the Skyfire servers which parses the information and returns the media in an HTML5 and H.264 format that the iPhone can handle. The app appeared on the App store for $2.99 and is now “sold out.” How can an intangible item like that be sold out? It isn’t. The overwhelming demand for this functionality sent users flocking to the app store which, in turn, brought down Skyfire’s servers. The official Skyfire blog says Skyfire for iPhone has been received with unbelievable enthusiasm. Despite our best attempts and predictions, the demand far exceeds our initial projections. 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. We are very grateful for the demand. Within 5 hours, Skyfire for iPhone became the top grossing app, the third highest paid app overall and the top application in the Utilities category. Wow! Please bear with us as we bring our capacity in line with the incredible demand – stay tuned. Skyfire is down, but not out. I believe they will revamp their back-end and beef it up to handle the requests and this will come back. Keep in mind that this will only help with streaming media, such as videos, but not interactive times like games. I do not think this is a message Apple will hear and we will still never see Flash loaded natively on the iPhone. Users will use Flash given the opportunity but the 14.1 million iPhones sold last quarter make it quite clear that they are content going without it as well.
