A new iOS app that plays Flash videos has been pulled from the App Store, because it proved too popular.
Skyfire is a web browser that enables Flash video not by installing Flash on the phone — something Apple won’t allow — but by uploading clips to its own servers and redelivering them wrapped in iOS-friendly HTML5.
But such was the demand for the $2.99 app after its launch in the US overnight, that those servers were overwhelmed.
“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,” Skyfire’s senior director of product management Robert Oberhofer wrote in a blog post.
”Thus we are effectively ‘sold out’ and will temporarily not accept new purchases from the App Store.”
Oberhofer said that Skyfire is working to increase capacity and will accepting new purchases from the App Store as soon as it can support them.
That Apple allowed Skyfire into the store in the first place is an apparent consequence of its decision to relax the rules governing app submissions and the publication of clear guidelines on what it deems to be acceptable in an iOS app.
