Flash on the iPhone is here with Skyfire

If you’ve been dying to watch Flash video on your iPhone, you’ll be pleased to hear about the release of Skyfire. Skyfire is an alternate web browser for the iPhone that allows you to watch Flash videos on the device, it does so by converting the Flash to HTML5 on the fly. When the Flash video is ready to watch, you tap on the play video icon at the bottom of Skyfire to load the video as HTML5. This obviously isn’t full Flash support, but it’s about as close as the iPhone will probably get without jailbreaking the device.

Skyfire Web Browser is intended for the iPhone and iPod touch, but also works on the iPad. It costs $2.99 and you can get Skyfire Web Browser from the iTunes Store.

The description on the App Store says that the $2.99 download is a ‘Special Early Adopter Price’ which would suggest it’s bound to cost more in the future. I have yet to try the app myself but it’s getting good reviews on the App Store, as well as from the New York Times and Engadget.

Update: Skyfire was temporarily removed from the App Store by the developer, they released the following statement explaining why:

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.

Thanks, Robert.

It sounds like the app will be available again once they figure out their bandwidth situation.