Within five hours of its release, Skyfire had become “the top grossing app, the third highest paid app overall and the top application in the Utilities category” according to company representatives. However, it has become a victim of this huge success and is now completely unavailable for download.
Skyfire Labs attempted to increase their server capacity to cope with yesterday’s demand, but they were simply overwhelmed and lacked the capacity to keep up. Robert Oberhofer, a Skyfire developer said on the company blog yesterday “Please bear with us as we bring our capacity in line with the incredible demand — stay tuned.”
This huge demand is a direct result of Apple’s refusal to support Adobe Flash directly, a product that many people consider a web standard for video and animated content. While Flash does have some issues – like most software does – the demand for Skyfire goes to show that a lot of people still want to use it on Apple devices.
Apple favour HTML5 over Adobe Flash, which they say is a better alternative in terms of the battery life and performance of their technology. The problem however, is that Flash is used a lot more than HTML5 at this time, no matter how hard Apple try to ignore this fact.
The capacity problems experienced by Skylab are a result of how it was forced to deal with Flash content. The Skyfire browser doesn’t actually show Flash directly, it converts it to HTML5 in order to be compatible with Apple technology. While this proxy-based translation system has received good reviews, it was obviously not ready for the huge amount of Flash content that users wanted to access.
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