“Skyfire launched its app that plays Flash video on the iPhone one day early, but it didn’t expect to pull the app off Apple’s App Store so soon,” David Goldman reports for CNNMoney. “After just five hours on the market on Wednesday, Skyfire stopped selling the app, as its servers were overwhelmed. The company said it was frantically working to increase its server capacity and would be selling another batch of the applications ‘very soon.'”
“‘Skyfire has historically generated high demand for its browser products but nothing like this,’ said Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck in a prepared statement. ‘It was hard to predict consumer demand since this was our first paid app, but we were blown away by the demand and sales.’ [With Skyfore], when users click on a page that contains Flash video, Skyfire’s servers download, render and translate the video into a video standard that Apple’s iOS devices support,” Goldman reports. “Skyfire then displays a thumbnail that users can click on to stream the video from its servers.”
“The app became the top grossing application in Apple’s App Store Wednesday and the third most-downloaded paid app,” Goldman reports. “The company also makes a similar browser for Android devices, which have been downloaded about 1.5 million times since it launched on the Android Marketplace in late April.”
Goldman reports, “The story of Skyfire’s overwhelmed servers is similar to that of Flipboard, a highly anticipated, glowingly reviewed, social media aggregating iPad application that crashed the company’s servers just hours into its debut on the App Store. Flipboard created a waiting list, and it took the company more than a month to get everyone access to the app.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Develop only for Android and your servers are safe. (smirk)
As we said on Tuesday regarding this app: “Enabling incompetent/ignorant/lazy/cheap purveyors of web video is no substitute for having them do it right in the first place. Get with the program: Stop using Flash. 120+ million users can’t see your videos and most aren’t about to pony up $2.99 to a third-party in order to work around your incompetence/ignorance/laziness/cheapness.”