14 DAY TRIAL // Skyfire Labs, the developer team behind the successful Skyfire browser has just announced that it will discontinue its original product v1.0 available for Windows Mobile and Symbian, by the end of 2010.
Apparently, the company decided to focus all its resources on developing Skyfire 2.0, which had an overnight success on the iOS platform.
“We are announcing that we will complete the phase out of our legacy v1.0 product on Windows Mobile and Symbian on December 31st, 2010 for remaining countries. This two-year old product used a “proxy browser” approach which is no longer our vision,” said Jeff Glueck, Skyfire Labs CEO.
“It was a revolutionary product when introduced and offered for free, but the fast-moving mobile market has changed significantly since 2007, and as a small tech start-up, we need to keep innovating forward,” added Glueck.
The reasons behind the company's decision may be the fact that Windows Mobile has a very small market share at the moment and the new Skyfire for Windows Phone 7, which the company develops, would require a complete rewrite, which means more time and resources spent.
“We do expect to bring Skyfire 2.0 to additional platforms, and have begun discussions with some carriers and OEMs to decide which will be our next OS. Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 and Nokia’s MeeGo platform are both shaping up as platforms with a lot of potential and the recent launch of the new Blackberry OS 6 with a WebKit browser core makes for interesting potential for a future release of Skyfire 2.0,” continued Glueck.
On the other hand, the new application for iPhone is a paid app and therefore easier to monetize, while the Symbian and Windows Mobile versions were free.
“We experimented with ways to charge for the product (in certain international test markets) so that existing Windows Mobile and Symbian users could continue to use the service, but the payment mechanisms were very cumbersome and the piracy rates were so high on those OS platforms that we could not make it work.”