Skyfire Brings Flash Support for Iphones

If, like me, you're accustomed to surfing the web on your iphone or android on a daily basis, then no doubt you get fairly frustrated with the lack of Flash support.

Flash for Iphones

The magic behind being able to view Flash content is that it takes Flash and transcodes it to HTML5 (on the Skyfire servers), the HTML then gets sent back to the mobile browser for display.

Skyfire for iPhone adheres to Apple development guidelines and was submitted to Apple a few months ago for approval. The Skyfire 2 browser is now available for download (at $2.99) on the Apple App Store (as of 3rd November). Demand has been so high that the availability has been stop / start and the news was that Skyfire spent the weekend building up their servers.

SkyFire was originally launched a few years ago, targeting Windows Mobile and Symbian handsets. It then expanding to Android and has now launched the Skyfire for Iphone browser.

In terms of playing flash content, the download speed and results seemed to me acceptable; although users should be aware that the Skyfire approach does not work with Flash games and some other non-video content. It also won't work with Hulu - which has banned SkyFire.

SkyFire has not been launched just for it's ability to transcode Flash; it is a highly developed Webkit browser which offers several key features it feels put it above it's competitor Iphone browsers:

• Related Content: an Explore icon allows easy access to releavnt related content (news, video, tweets)
• Sharing: a Share icon allows easy sharing of content via Facebook, Twitter or e-mail
• User Agent Switching: allows easy switching between loading pages for mobile / desktop
• Privacy: SkyFire claim to keep your browsing private, with no data trail.

On this last point of privacy, I have read several articles which claim the reverse; that SkyFire is actually collecting personal data with a view to use this for advertising purpose.

In summary; SkyFire is not without it's drawbacks, but for me it's certainly worth a try as an alternative to Iphone default Safari browser. The point remains that if you want to see flash content on your Iphone then Skyfire is really your only option. It's really this point that I find the most surprising: that Apple have allowed this situation where the only tenable option for viewing Flash content is via a paid third-party provider.

Skyfire release news item on Uk Release Dates website.