SkyFire = iPhone + Flash

It’s no secret that Apple isn’t the biggest fan of Adobe’s Flash. One of the big criticisms of the iPhone is its inability to display Flash content, which upon the device’s release, made up a huge portion of the internet’s streaming videos and games.

This inspired Steve Jobs to write an open letter back in April, criticising the technology on multiple fronts, including: openness, size, reliability, power consumption and development. One can only assume that lost somewhere in the first draft of this letter was a reference to Flash’s mother, possibly linked to some remark about obesity, perhaps having her own postcode.

As well as irritating Adobe, whose CEO Shantanu Narayen later announced the company had “moved on” from iOS development, it extinguished any hope left in iPhone owners that they will ever get to watch Megavideo or play Miniclip games on their pocket pal of choice.

One can only assume that lost somewhere in the first draft of this letter was a reference to Flash’s mother, possibly linked to some remark about obesity, perhaps having her own postcode

Then along came Skyfire, an alternative mobile browser choice with a twist, previously only available on the Android platform. Skyfire’s brand new iOS app finally brought Flash video to the iPhone (without having to go the jailbreak route). This feat of Apple defiance is achieved by transcoding the video into Apple-friendly HTML5 wrapped H.264 on their own servers, before streaming it to users. On top of this killer feature is a fully functioning mobile browser built on top of the Webkit underpinnings that powers Mobile Safari, maintaining most of the capabilities seen in the built-in iOS browser, but adding things like: private browsing (porn mode, if you will), a related pages explorer and fast access to Facebook.

As one can imagine, it has been a huge success. Just hours after its US release the app shot to number one in the iTunes app charts and had to be pulled by Skyfire as their servers were crippled by the sudden onset of iPhone users. Early downloaders who have given it a try seem to be happy with the product. Flash is a bit slow to load as the servers do their converting, but the content is delivered with a decent quality. One drawback is that the HTML5 video returned to the user does not allow scrolling to a specific point in time in the video, nor can it implement the “skip ad” features that some sites offer.

It’s also important to note that this technology does not work with Flash games, so procrastinating in lectures will still be best done with apps or laptops.

At the time of writing, the app remains pulled from the app store, but will slowly be re-released in the US to be sold in ‘batches’ and expanded globally as Skyfire reinforces their servers to deal with us demanding iPhone users. While it’s not in Apple’s nature to change their principles when it comes to user-interface and how that interacts with features, this app makes one thing tremendously clear: iOS users want Flash!