Flash comes to the iPhone via Skyfire, Android gets it for free

Despite Steve Jobs’ insistence that Flash in an unnecessary evil, the inability to view Flash content has remained one of the major inconveniences for iPhone users. It’s true that Flash itself is often slow, buggy, and a drain on the battery. However, faced with degraded performance or the inability to view certain content at all, many users would still opt for the ability to view the content rather than not at all.

 Skyfire became the first iPhone browser capable of delivering Flash-based video to the user and demand for the app was so great back in November 2010 that it was withdrawn from sale within 5 hours of its launch.

What is the reason for that? The web browser, which is also available on other smartphone platforms – including Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile – does not play Flash natively, but still enables iPhone users to view the content on their devices by converting it to the iPhone-compatible H.264 video codec prior to downloading. However, this on-the-fly encoding does not come without serious overheads on the Skyfire servers, and just five hours after the app had shot to number one in the iTunes store, it was withdrawn as the company attempted to increase its bandwidth.

To prove the necessity and demand for Flash support in Apple devices, we will just have to look at the sales revenue of Skyfire back in November 2010 when it was first released. The company earned a whooping US$1 million in its first weekend on sale with a retail price of US$2.99 per download. Looking at the positive side, Android users will not need to go through the same inconveniences to view Flash content and Skyfire is free for Android.