Skyfire Flash Decoding App for iPhone Gets Pulled by the Makers Themselves

Avid Softpedia readers may remember that Skyfire, a Mountain View, California startup company, was anxiously awaiting its Flash-converting app to go live in the Apple App Store. It did, but only for a few hours. The reason? Demand for the app was so high that it overwhelmed their servers.

For those who haven’t been reading Softpedia lately, Skyfire basically translates Flash videos into iPhone-friendly formats, effectively giving iPhone owners Flash support.

Skyfire’s press room has been updated with a quick notice saying that “Skyfire for iPhone has been received with unbelievable enthusiasm. Despite our best attempts and predictions, the demand far exceeds our initial projections.”

The company is featuring a screenshot of the mobile version of the App Store where the Skyfire app is shown with a “sold out” sign.

“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,” the company’s Robert Oberhofer writes.

“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,” Robert says.

Despite having a rough time selling their product at the moment, the company is extremely pleased with the way things turned out.

After all, it’s better to know your app is craved for and have your servers crash, rather than see your servers operate cool and silent, without too much enthusiasm from the iOS install base.

“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!”, the enthusiastic Robert adds.

“Please bear with us as we bring our capacity in line with the incredible demand – stay tuned,” the Skyfire staffer concludes his post.

When everything is sorted out, the Skyfire app should be available for download from this location (iTunes link).