Hours after hitting Apple’s App Store, the Skyfire browser, which allows the display of Adobe Flash content on iOS devices, was removed. Developer Skyfire Labs said demand “far exceeded our initial projections.”
The app sold for $2.99 and was gone within five hours of launch, but Skyfire insisted the removal was voluntary, with no interference from the App Store gatekeepers.
Come Back Later
“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,” wrote Robert Oberhofer on the company’s blog. “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.”
Mountain View, Calif.,-based Skyfire said the browser was the top-grossing app for the iPhone, the third-highest-paid app overall, and the top application in the utilities category at the time it was pulled. It promised to have the app back online for Apple users in the near future. The blog proudly displayed an image of its App Store offering on an iPhone screen with the words Sold Out.
Demand likely surged because users wanted to test the Flash video capabilities on Apple mobile devices, said Gartner Research analyst Michael Gartenberg.
“Skyfire has been around for a while on various platforms, but being on a platform with iOS popularity overwhelmed them pretty quickly,” said Gartenberg, who said the company’s retreat was wise. “Better to pull the app [and] work to preserve the experience for existing users before taking new ones on.”
Breaking the Ban
Skyfire is also available from Google’s Android Market, Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace, and Nokia’s Ovi Store for Symbian-based phones. The company said it had…