SkyFire Pulls In Nearly $1 Million In Its First Weekend On The App Store
Just about every time I write about SkyFire, the cross-platform (and generally free) smartphone browser capable of churning through most Flash videos, someone always says: “Great! But uh, how are they going to make money?”
Context & Ripple Effects
SkyFire has spent years giving away its browser on other platforms, which is exactly why the recurring question around every MobileCrunch write-up has been how the company ever expects to earn money. The answer arrived in two steps this month: Apple approved the iOS browser, which sidesteps the Flash ban by converting Flash video into HTML5 before it reaches the handset, and paying users then delivered nearly $1 million in the app's first weekend on the store.
The result lands in the middle of a running industry argument about Flash on phones — VentureBeat covered the economics of mobile Flash distribution back in February 2009 — and it hands SkyFire the rare position of being both an Apple-approved workaround and a directly monetized one.
First-order effects
- SkyFire now has a proven, user-funded revenue line on iOS: the $1M weekend converts a free cross-platform browser into a paid product whose value is precisely the Flash playback Apple's own Safari does not offer.
- Apple's approval establishes that server-side conversion of banned formats is a viable path through App Store review, not just for SkyFire but for any developer with a similar transcoding pitch.
Second-order effects
- Rival mobile browsers face pressure to either match the Flash-video workaround or differentiate on features SkyFire cannot replicate, since the conversion trick is now a purchasable commodity rather than a demo.
- Content publishers serving Flash video gain an unexpected new iOS audience through SkyFire's servers, giving them a reason to keep Flash assets alive for mobile rather than rushing native or HTML5 rebuilds.
Third-order effects
- If paid transcoding browsers keep clearing review, the App Store becomes a marketplace where platform owners effectively auction access to web technologies they refuse to support natively — the browser vendor, not the content owner, captures the fee.
- The pattern points toward mobile web access consolidating around gateway services that re-encode the desktop web per platform, with each platform's review policy acting as the de facto regulator of which middlemen survive.
The trend: Mobile browsing is splitting into platform-native clients and paid gateway services that re-encode the desktop web where platform owners restrict plugins.